Elizabeth Gower


Elizabeth Gower is an Australian abstract artist known for paper and mixed-media monochrome and coloured collages who lives and works in Melbourne. Gower has exhibited large textile and paper installations as well as collected and recycled objects and images. Her work developed as a young artist during the 1970s feminist movement Gower has been a senior lecturer at art college, curated exhibitions by other artists and authored essays and catalogues. A 2018 Australian Arts Review article about Gower stated that her teaching and art have influenced many of Melbourne's emerging artists.

Personal life

Gower was first married to Howard Arkley then John R Neeson. Gower and Neeson collaborate as artists and co-curators as well as producing individual work.

Education

Gower's education history reflects her art career based in Melbourne, emerging as a feminist artist in the 70s, developing her collection and collage practice and becoming a senior lecturer. In 1973, Gower completed a Diploma of Art and Design, Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne; a Diploma of Education, Melbourne Teachers College, 1974; a Master of Arts, RMIT University, Melbourne, 1995 and a PhD, Monash University, Melbourne in 2014.

Artistic career

Gower's interest is in the human desire to create order from the chaotic. She creates collages and wall hangings, largely abstract compositions from domestic materials such as newspaper and tissue paper, as well as on transparent surfaces of fish, crabs and other crustaceans, fruit and vegetables, grasses, beetles, butterflies, flowers, insects, snakes, frogs, animals and shoes. Collecting ephemera, discarded printed material and papers has been integral to her art practice.
In 2005 Kate Just outlined substantial changes in Gower's practice in a review in Eyeline journal: "In recent years, however, Gower’s collecting has eschewed the material world in favour of more evocative things: meaningful events, conversations and places that have marked the world at large. After September 11, Gower compiled lists of significant attacks, invasions, battles, or conflicts which took place in the modern world between September 11, 1901 and September 11, 2001 and presented them on long sheets of drafting film."
Gower has been exhibiting since the 1970s and is represented by Sutton Gallery in Melbourne. The Geelong Art Gallery hosted a major survey of Gower's work in 2018, Cuttings- Elizabeth Gower, which covered significant bodies of work from early 2000 onwards.

Academic career

Gower has held teaching positions at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts and is an Honorary Fellow of the University.

Recognition and awards

Gower won the Lynch Prize for Painting in 1973, Georges Art Prize 1978, Alliance Francaise Art Fellowship 1980, Mornington Drawing Prize in 1995, Australian Postgraduate Award in 2006 and various residencies and grants over decades from 1977 to 2017 with residencies in Berlin, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Barcelona, Italy and Hobart.

Exhibitions

Solo

From 1975 Gower has held many regular solo exhibitions in private and state galleries in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra and in regional galleries. Internationally, her work has been shown in New York, London, Paris and the United Arab Emirates.
Her series of Cuttings exhibitions were of discarded materials or ephemera found and re-purposed into artworks during her residencies: Cuttings Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Bellas Gallery, Brisbane 2001; Cuttings Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2004; Cuttings Sutton Project Space, Melbourne, 2008 and Cuttings Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2010. The Cuttings series culminated in a survey exhibition in 2018, Cuttings- Elizabeth Gower at the Geelong Art Gallery.
Other survey exhibitions have included Chance or Design and Beyond the Everyday touring Victoria in 1995–96 and 2002–03, Conversations 1955 - 2005 and Sites 1980 - 2005 Victorian College of the Arts Gallery, Melbourne 2005, Beyond the everyday: The art of Elizabeth Gower 1974 - 2002 Glen Eira City Gallery, Melbourne 2002 and Mildura Arts Centre, Hamilton Art Gallery and Wangaratta Exhibition Gallery, 2003, Line of Thought 1975-2002 and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman 1974 - 2002 Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2002.

Group

Since the 70s, Gower has showed regularly in group exhibitions, especially those about feminist, abstract or collage art. Some significant group exhibitions have included Treasures of a Decade, 1968-1978 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1978, Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 1979, Fieldwork Australian Art 1968-2002 : National Gallery of Victoria 2002, Imaging the apple, various galleries, Sydney, Melbourne, regional areas, New York, 2004-5, 2010, Cut with a knife touring Melbourne and regional galleries 2012-13, Howard Arkley, Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2015, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013, Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists, from the National Gallery of Australia collection touring to regional galleries 2017, and Unfinished Business: perspectives on feminism and art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2018.

Public commissions

Gower has also been commissioned to produce several public artworks such as banners, light boxes, facades, floor and wall murals. The Lost and Found floor mural in the arena foyer at Sydney Olympic Park features broken line drawings of athletes and sporting motifs. Other public commissions reproduce her collages in a different format.