Summary
Elizabeth Gower has been making and exhibiting her paper-based art since the late 1970s. She has been single-minded in her collecting and sorting of paper ephemera from magazines, advertising, packaging and similar popular-culture sources. Her collecting is arguably as important as her construction of the final work of art, for far from being random assemblages of printed matter, these coherent collections each define a particular place and time, and are used accordingly.
Gower cuts and collages her found paper into elaborate geometric patterns, and this visual trope characterises the shape of her oeuvre. Her visual symmetries, repetitions, equivalences, networks and patterning bring aesthetic order and systematisation to her chosen symbols of consumerism. At the heart of Gower's work is a critique of consumption and the false promises of advertising that drive our desire to consume. Her meticulously ordered cut-outs bring a calmness to and a sense of refuge from the screeching voice of advertising and the clamouring products that clutter and encumber our existences.
'Artefacts from the 20th Century' is from a series of the same name, which Gower created between 1995 and 1999. The series features everyday items such as office and domestic furniture, running shoes, irons, rings, pens and cars, things of much everyday currency in the late 20th century. In this particular work, images of generic-looking sofas are arranged into tidy clusters of four, each joined by pictures of intersecting pens and rings - the whole ensemble encircled by linking tables and pens. The regular pattern that emerges from these images of cheap, functional objects seems to convey both the austerity of a town hall lobby and the intimacy of an embroidered handkerchief.
