Elizabeth Hohimer 
1991
Currently Marfa, Texas
Represented by Gerald Peters Contemporary 
please contact Evan Feldman, efeldman@gpgallery.com with inquiries about Elizabeth Hohimer's work. 

Elizabeth Hohimer is an artist from Texas, born in 1991. She received her BFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts. She lives in Marfa, Texas. Her woven paintings are are made on a 16 shaft European floor loom.

Elizabeth's practice is bound through an intersection of skilled tradition and a contemporary dialog between materials, memory and self. Her influences stem from a period where she traveled continually from Texas to California, snaking through the southwest, and her past life as a contemporary ballet dancer. It feels obvious that her upbringing on dirt roads and under the big Texas sky was critical to her present innate ability to translate experiences within such landscape into direct formal interactions in her woven paintings. Hohimer is most interested in the attempt to convey fleeting emotions brought about through sublime experiences found in passing landscapes, love, or lingering loss. Her sensitive perceptions of color and space are filtered into her woven paintings through her formal decision involving restraint and sometimes questioning amounts of open/empty space. The works are sensual abstractions from experiences that come with grand emotion. She likes to work on, "things so potent that they need time to be reckoned with.”

Working from the memory of emotion, her woven paintings dive into the shared psychological landscapes that certain colors and materials provide {and she adds [as well as the landscapes that I can carry in me representing the places and people I have been, (nodding to Joan Mitchell's famous  quote)]}.
Elizabeth says that for her," in the act of making there almost seems to be no becoming only the act of transcending into and with my work that is true for the viewer too, if they choose."

 

Hohimer's woven paintings carry in them a lingering atmospheric nostalgia. This is connected to her attachment to materials and what they put into the work energetically  prior to weaving. Elizabeth dyes her warp threads through a cautious combination of the colors from clays she collects in desert landscapes, found flowers and paint. This effort within the warp threads mixes with chance to give a base for paintings to be produced. Within one work, you can catch two auras almost, the warps wildness and the weft's mapped to the thread qualities combine and then collapse like a contagion of dancers into her signature style formats. The suspended passage of time that takes place where the horizon line is visible is integral for clarity to be found for Elizabeth. Process choices within production give time and space for the artist to re-harmonize dissonance. A sense of ethereal, allegorical, philosophical tendencies that are not grounded or interested in reality of the present are integrated into her practice.

​

​