Liza is both an artist and lecturer who is based in the North of England. The work she makes is created in response to the landscape of Britain. Liza has continued to be inspired by the landscape and has used these threads of interest in her creative response to the Textile Archive at Bradford College.
Liza chose to look at the Lister’s Mill and Denholme Velvet archive boxes for her inspiration, as many of her relatives have worked in Bradford’s Textile Industry. Her great great granddad Mr. Albert Rushton worked 63½ years’ continuous service at Lister and Co Ltd at Manningham Mills.
It was both these personal and historical traces that Liza elected to combine in her artistic response to the Textile Archive. She explored these links with the past and the present. She used plant specimens in her final pieces as representations of a life that existed both in the past and has its material remains in the present.
Some of her inspiration came from a particular Lister’s Mill archive box with the decorative golden threads of the design work of George Arnold, this textile piece inspired Liza’s work, Arnold’s cloth of gold was commissioned by Madame Tussauds for ‘Queen Mary’ in 1919.
Her previous bodies of work have been nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012 and the Prix Pictet (Earth) Photography Award 2009.