Vessels: Beth Elliott, Teresa Roche and Liz Rundorff Smith
Art & Light Gallery is happy to present “Vessels”, an exhibition of work by Beth Elliott (Asheville, N.C.), Teresa Roche (Greenville, S.C.) and Liz Rundorff Smith (Travelers Rest, S.C.) launching on the Art & Light website and in the gallery at 10:00 AM (EST) on Tuesday, December 2 with an opening reception on Friday, December 5 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.
The word vessel means different things depending on context. A hollow container for transporting or holding something, a boat, a channel supporting life, a person, a message . . . the meanings are so vast it’s as though the word vessel describes life itself. The vessel is often defined by its shape but, more importantly, by its function and by the presumption that it contains something. The artists included in the Vessels exhibition find commonality in visual form, even as they approach meaning differently, by reinterpreting the concept of a container beyond its functional purpose. The vessel form—whether a ceramic pot or a sculptural abstraction—becomes a metaphor for holding or containing ideas, memories, and emotions.
Beth Elliott reduces the vessel and its surface design to simple, modest, representational forms, the surfaces of which outline internal stories and landscapes. Elliott’s educational foundation in biochemistry and landscape architecture heavily influences her visions and forms in clay and sculpture, although her art is intentionally directed away from the precision that both science and architecture require. The freedom to create with abandon and explore with unfettered curiosity is essential to her artwork. Learning and studying materials and incorporating their properties and nuances into her work is an ongoing part of Beth’s artistic practice. She finds textural significance in her art while striving to create interpretable but abstract forms.
Teresa Roche is a mixed media artist working in acrylic, watercolor, and collage. In building layers of paint and then scratching and sanding back into the surface, Roche’s mixed media works are excavations of sorts- an unearthing of the past, which is then transformed into a new, abstracted story. The creative process and manipulation of materials fuels her work. Experimentation and combining of unlikely materials is an ongoing part of her creative practice. Her paintings often reflect a period of time or a memory, but the abstract process allows for paint and other making tools to come together in unexpected ways.
Liz Rundorff Smith paints bold, bright and iconic abstractions in oil and encaustic paint. Her vibrant color palette is reminiscent of the decor and design trends of decades past that have become kitschy artifacts. Her work elevates the mundane, mimicking the way we bring significance to loss with keepsakes and memorials. She wants to create work that evokes a sense of nostalgia and exposes the sentimentality in memory, using shape to intimate objects that are no longer identifiable but retain familiarity and reference urns, shrines, and places of veneration. Embellishments like fringe and shiny gold finishes play into kitsch, recalling party decorations, parade floats and prize ribbons and elevating the ordinary to something to be celebrated.
