Elizabeth Burden (she/her/hers) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works use drawing, painting, sculpture, video, coding, mapping, and other processes to interpret and reinterpret personal, community, and societal narratives about identity, memory, belonging, (dis)placement, (in)visibility, erasure, and the unspeakable. The common thread that runs through all her work is to look at old realities anew, to confront those realities, reflect upon them, shape them, and transform them. Whether through studio practice or community-engaged processes, she believes we can all be creative catalysts for change.
Her process begins with reading, research, and writing. Often, a work begins with a word of a phrase that prompts and image, or an emotional reaction that defies words. She then moves to collecting journalistic and archival photos as references, a nod to her continuing relationship with her first profession. Last comes experimentation in the studio, in which she (re)solves questions relating the philosophical (why), technical (how, which mediums), relational, spatial, temporal, and practical aspects of the works-in-progress.
Ms. Burden holds bachelor’s degrees in Journalism and Studio Art, and a master’s degree in Geographic Information Science.