Elizabeth Gower

Gower was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1952.[1] In 1973 she completed a Diploma of Art and Design at Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne. She also holds a Diploma of Education, Melbourne Teachers College (1974), a Master of Arts, RMIT University, Melbourne (1995) and a PhD from Monash University, Melbourne (2014).[2]

Gower has held teaching positions at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne.[3] Throughout this academic career, Gower has curated exhibitions and research projects and authored essays and catalogues.[2] These projects build on her professional and creative interests, and often bring together groups of emerging and established artists.[4] Australian Arts Review argues that her teaching and art have influenced many of Melbourne's emerging artists.[5]

Gower has been exhibiting since 1975[6] and is represented by Sutton Gallery in Melbourne[7] and Milani Gallery in Brisbane.[8] Her work developed as a young artist during the 1970s feminist movement,[9] and with her involvement with groups such as the Women's Art Movement, the Women's Art Register and the Lip Collective. Her use of collages and wall hangings in largely abstract compositions deploys domestic materials such as newspaper and tissue paper, as well as textiles and craft techniques.[10] Curator Lisa Sullivan states that Gower's work elevates forms and practises derisively considered ‘women’s work’ to the status of art.[6]

Collecting ephemera, discarded printed material and paper cuttings is also integral to Gower's critique of consumerism and waste. Gower uses graphic design elements and repetition of cut out pictures of spectacles, shoes, tea-bag labels or stickers from fruit, to create decorative and optical effects, often on transparent paper. Other works explore multiple images of fish, crabs and other crustaceans, fruit and vegetables, grasses, beetles, butterflies, flowers, insects, snakes and frogs.[11]

In 2005, artist Kate Just outlined substantial changes in Gower's practice in a review in Eyeline journal: "In recent years, however, Gower’s collecting has eschewed the material world in favour of more evocative things: meaningful events, conversations and places that have marked the world at large. After September 11, Gower compiled lists of significant attacks, invasions, battles, or conflicts which took place in the modern world between September 11, 1901 and September 11, 2001 and presented them on long sheets of drafting film."[12]

The Geelong Art Gallery hosted a major survey of Gower's work in 2018, Cuttings- Elizabeth Gower, which covered significant bodies of work from early 2000 onwards.[13][5]

Gower has been awarded numerous awards and residencies throughout her long career: The Lynch Prize for Painting, Toorak Art Gallery (1973),[14] Georges Art Prize (1978),[14] Alliance Francaise Art Fellowship (1980),[14] Mornington Drawing Prize in 1995,[14] Fellowship grant, Australia Council, Visual Arts/Crafts Board (2002) and an Australian Postgraduate Award (2006).[14] She has travelled extensively and completed a number of prestigious international residencies including the Australia Council, Visual Arts/Crafts Board, Green Street Studio, NYC (2008), the Art Gallery of New South Wales Denise Hickey studio, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2007), the Australia Council Visual Arts/Crafts Board, Barcelona Studio (2000), the Australia Council Visual Arts/Crafts Board, Paretaio Studio, Italy (1983), Point B Residency, NYC (2014), and the Institut für alles Mögliche studio in Wedding, Berlin (2019).[15][16][2]

She was first married to Howard Arkley (1973-1980?)[31] then John R Neeson (1984- ). Gower and Neeson collaborate as artists and co-curators as well as producing individual work.[32]

• Official website
• National Gallery of Victoria, artist profile and works in the collection, Elizabeth Gower