Multimedia artist Lizz Freeman has been taking photographs of her daily life since she was 14 years old. Photography, she says, “lit a fire under me and made me so excited about art.” The pictures, mostly self-portraits from her adolescence in the 1980s and ’90s, are “so incredibly vivid that I can put the smell back in, I can put the feeling in the air back in. It is the place where my memories are held.” She now creates multimedia collage art from those photos, reflecting on “time and memory, and how those things slip in and out of each other so easily. They’re little portals or windows into another world,” full of intricacies that encourage viewers to reflect on the art-making process and their own memories of young adulthood. Several of these multimedia collages currently comprise a solo exhibition, Attention to Detail, on view at Staple Goods in New Orleans.
Future Days, 2025, thread, inkjet photo on silk, salvaged fabric and objects, kid printed fabric, cyanotype, 37 x 23 inches. (Photo courtesy of Abbie Brandao.)
Freeman begins each work with salvaged textiles, which she’s been collecting for more than 30 years. After printing a photo-collage onto fabric (she favors silk), she pieces the fabric together with a sewing machine that completes 1,000 stitches per minute, which happens “so rapidly, it will destroy the silk as the new stitches are going in, or push the elements away to kind of expand and distort the original image and change it,” she says. “It’s a process of deconstruction and construction at the same time.” This distortion is intended to reflect the way our memories bend and warp over time, as well. “When we recall a memory, we’re actually degrading it a little bit,” Freeman says. “We rewrite it in our mind. So this process is starting with a real image from life, and then adding to it—creating more space and depth around it—and then subsequently turning it into something else based on the memory.” Each of Freeman’s pieces takes more than 100 hours to complete, between the layers and layers of hand embroidery and sewing machine work. “The thing I want to impart is: Working with your hands, bringing something into the world from nothing, is so important,” she says. There’s a “greater sense of immediacy to nurture these skills and encourage people to take part in these skills. If you have a creative and imaginative mind, which everybody does, you can make something from nothing, and that’s where the magic lies. Pushing a button on a computer is not quite the same thing as bringing something to life with your own two hands.”
