Liz Sage
Artist living and working in Brighton and Hove, UK
My drawings are an invitation to step beyond the everyday by looking at that everyday. I work in charcoal and pastel, creating large scale pieces to reframe the familiar and demand full attention for the taken-for-granted. My process involves moving through my habitus – the buildings, the landscapes, the people – taking deliberately bad photographs of instances that snag my attention, and then exploring that ‘snag’ as I use the photograph as a basis for a drawing. I draw primarily through erasure and work on A1, A0 or larger surfaces, giving me time and space to discover what is breaking into the world, what needs to be noticed in that specific instant.
In doing so, I use the simplest art materials to strip out the noise of the normal and reveal the sublime in the everyday; the ache in an empty street, the longing behind a streetlight in the dark, the infinite rolling in to a seaside resort. Much as Roland Barthes describes the possibility that something unexpected in a snapshot can pull us into ‘a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see’, so my drawings are an effort to capture those fleeting seconds in our daily routine when the beyond breaks in and speaks to our deepest desires. (Barthes, Camera Lucida)
Selected CV
Exhibitions:
'Nightscapes’ at Damage Salon, Brighton, UK (26th October 2024)
‘Cheap and Low’ Exhibition, Metropolis Gallery, Brighton, UK (March – April 2023)
Performances:
Hi Zero, January 2018
Education:
Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, West Dean College of Art, Design and Restoration, Chichester, UK (2018-2020)
PhD in Critical Theory, University of Sussex, UK (AHRC funded)(2008-2012)
Selected publications:
Sage, Liz (2016) ‘Women's fiction after the War’. In: Boxall, Peter and Cheyette, Bryan (eds.) British and Irish fiction since 1940. The Oxford history of the novel in English, 7. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 110-127. ISBN 9780198749394
Sage, Liz (2015) ‘Embodying terror: reading terrorism with Luce Irigaray’. In: Irigaray, Luce and Marder, Michael (eds.) Building a new world: Luce Irigaray: teaching II. Palgrave studies in postmetaphysical thought. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 222-236. ISBN 9781137453013
Sage, Liz (2015) Anxiety in the British media portrayals of schoolgirls heading for Syria. E-International Relations.
Sage, Elizabeth M (2013) The image and the body in modern fiction’s representations of terrorism: embodying the brutality of spectacle. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University of Sussex.
Sage, Liz (2013) The impossible terrorist: women, violence, and the disavowal of female agency in terrorism discourses. Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 4 (Sp 1). ISSN 1948-1845
Sage, Liz (2011) [Review] Luce Irigaray (2008) Conversations. Textual Practice, 25 (1). 206 - 209. ISSN 0950-236X
