Exhibition runs 12 June - 25 August 2022

Open Mondays - Fridays 8.30am - 4pm, Saturdays 8.30am - 3pm and Sunday 9am - 2pm 

Please note that we will occasionally need to close the exhibition due to recordings taking place in the concert hall. We will give as much notice as possible. Please check the website before visiting.

Liz McGowan exhibition

the spirit wraps around me: nature as a second skin

What would it be like to experience a deep sensual immersion in the world around us?

Supposing, instead of walking on a footpath or a beach, we were walking in, or inside an ever changing

kaleidoscope of texture, colour, light and process...

Supposing we were literally cloaked in our surroundings?

Liz McGowan explores these ideas through her creative collaboration with the detail, patterns and processes of landscape, calling attention to a continual multi-sensual exchange with our surroundings. This body of work, exhibited at the Granary, includes cloaks, sculpture and earth works. 

Each cloak is made with materials from a specific Norfolk habitat - tideline, reed bed, saltmarsh, river and barley field. 'Cloak' is a concept that we usually only apply to our clothes, regarding them as an extension of ourselves. In reality we are constantly immersed in a multi-sensual exchange with our surroundings. McGowan describes the cloak as 'mediating between the human body and the landscape it emerges from. It’s an invitation to immerse oneself in the more than human world, like plunging into cold water.'

Alongside the cloaks, the exhibition includes several of McGowan's Chthon earth works. Chthon is one of several Greek words for  'earth’ referring specifically to that which is under the earth. In English, ‘chthonic’ describes deities or spirits of the underworld. These works are the result of playing with saltmarsh mud in liquid and solid form, to create patterns and sculptures, exploring what it does and how it moves. McGowan writes: 'At the same time this activity links in to a chthonic energy – raw, earthy – a planet in crisis meeting an inner, empathetic roar.' 

About the artist

Liz McGowan works with natural and found materials, creating responses to particular environments through installation, sculpture, drawing and conversation. Her focus is the meeting point between inner and outer landscapes, where personal creativity is given inspiration and form by those elements – stone, reed, tree, earth, tideline – that combine to form a landscape. She describes her work as being 'in conversation with the Norfolk landscape, exploring the meeting points between inner and outer landscapes'. Her inspirations are the detail, pattern and processes – reed, mud, wind, wave, erosion, tideline – that combine to form a particular environment.