Liz Finch

Liz Finch is a British artist known for her sculptures made from found and made objects, dreamlike paintings, and anarchic performances. Combining the familiar and the strange, the sinister and the comedic, Finch’s work simultaneously presents and subverts the imagery of everyday life.

The daughter of a vicar, she was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1951. In the face of her religious upbringing, she fostered her own independent thought and expression, beginning drawing from a young age. She went on to pursue art at Burnley School of Art in 1968, where she met artist Brian Clarke, beginning their lifelong relationship. Both going on to study at North Devon College of Art and Design in 1970, they lived what Clarke has described as an “arcadian” life in Devon, until Finch fractured her skull in a cycling accident in her early twenties. This life-altering event became the subject of a series of paintings ‘Near-death experience’, reflecting her brush with mortality.

Marrying Clarke, they settled in Preston in 1972. In what Finch has described as a continued period of convalescence, she began to create her ‘Boxmen’ sculptures, beginning a series that she would pursue throughout her life. Featuring cereal box torsos, suspended by strings, and sewn heads, the ‘Boxmen’ embody distinct and sometimes unsettling personalities, reimagining objects from everyday life. By the 1980s, she was embedded in London’s Neo-absurdist performance scene, leading her to perform across America. In 1989, motherhood brought new shifts in Finch's life and work, marked by a greater use of paint. Later, she relocated to Hastings, where she began what she describes as her "rescue paintings”, buying and overpainting second-hand paintings, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This blend of the familiar and the strange is a recurring thread in Finch’s work. Bricks, a repeated motif, anchor even her most dreamlike paintings in the imagery of her daily surroundings. Often exploring early childhood perception, dolls return in her work, from installations to soft sculptures. Finch has described her fascination with the textures of "bad sewing", comparing her red stitching to medical suture. These themes find echoes in Finch's poetry and writing, which also play a crucial role in her work.

Finch has performed Crochet Nude (2006) at the Tate Modern, London, and her art has been shown at exhibitions, including A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense: A Portrait of Robert Fraser, with the Royal Academy and Pace Gallery, London, 2015, and Cautionary Tales: Old Visions Through New Eyes at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York, 2015-2016. In 2021, HENI published Liz Finch: Twenty Entities, showcasing her ‘Boxmen’, alongside written recollections, and Liz Finch: The Romance of Bricks, a portrait of her life and work, originally captured by avant-garde filmmaker Nichola Bruce.Entrancing and unsettling, Finch presents the debris of dreams, finding humour in the absurdities of the world. In her own words, “Artistically I am both Insider and Outsider. My work illustrates what I perceive as I pass from one side to the other. It is this atmospheric tension I am interested in more than aesthetics or accuracy… I both question and court the concept of random.”