Elizabeth Willing

Elizabeth Willing is a Brisbane based visual artist whose works are performative and often participatory explorations of food and hosting. Primarily working in sculpture, installation, and performance, Elizabeth’s work additionally takes the form of hosted meals.

Elizabeth has undertaken professional development mentorships in New York with Janine Antoni (2011), with the Experimental Food Society in London (2012) and then with Thomas Rentmeister in Berlin (2014). She undertook her undergraduate study in Fine Arts in 2009, and in 2019 completed a Masters of Fine Art (research) at Queensland University of Technology.

In 2014 Elizabeth was the recipient of the Australia Council Kunstlerhaus Bethanien one-year residency. Furthermore Elizabeth has undertaken residencies at Helsinki International Art Program HIAP (2015), New England Regional art Museum Armidale (2018), The Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide (2019), Museum of Brisbane (2020), Urban Art Projects (2022), Latrobe Art Institute and Wangaratta Art Gallery (2024). In 2022 Elizabeth is an inaugural recipient of Metro Arts MAVA Pathfinders program which included a one-year fellowship and residency.

Exhibitions of Elizabeth’s work have been held in Australia and overseas at Trapholt Museum of Art and Design Denmark, Tinguely Museum Basel, The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane, Musee Beaux Arts Angers France, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.

Awards and grants include Australia Council Project funding (2016, 2017, 2022), the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship (2013), Arts Queensland funding (2011, 2019, 2023), a JUMP mentoring Scholarship (2010), the Melville Haysom Scholarship through QAGOMA (2010). In 2023 Elizabeth was awarded VACS Major Commissioning funding from Creative Australia to develop her first artist-led restaurant.

Elizabeth’s work has been written about in magazines Eyeline, Artlink, Vault, Art Collector, Imprint and online forums Art Fridge, Vice, Raven Contemporary and Critical Mass. She was also notably included in publications The Oxford Companion to Food, EAT ME, and Experimental Eating.

Elizabeth is represented by Tolarno Galleries Melbourne

Food is a fundamental catalyst for relationship building, and a mediator in the delicate art of hospitality. This is what I have been brought-up to believe, and this is what forms the basis for my studio research. I am primarily working across sculpture, installation, and performance, with many of my works being participatory.  My material palette is diverse, and often site-specific, including butter, sherbet, recycled timber, scented wax, potatoes, ceramics, shortbread, or plant-based sedatives. 

What do we welcome past the mouth threshold? Food, lovers, medicine, living or dead things, and nutrition made in the ground, the factory, or the lab. Hospitality is something we can enact both outwardly and internally, a framework to consider the ethical and psychological decision making involved in consumption, and the rhizomic nature of digestion. Highly processed foods, or food technology, poses new challenges to the alimentary canal which acts as the filtering threshold for the body.

Hosting is performed or embodied by my artworks. By welcoming viewers, I am attempting to highlight, and even manipulate the host/guest dynamic. Hosting then becomes a catalyst to speak to hostility, digestion, and the dangers of taking something inside.