Liza McCosh, a Warrnambool based artist, takes the natural elements of her environment as inspiration for her creativity. The south-west Victorian landscape highlights nature’s elements with rugged coastlines, dramatic sky-scapes and volcanic topography.  Themes of water, air, earth and fire, inspired by this immediate environment, have dominated McCosh’s practice over the preceding twenty-five years.  An interest in the Sublime, environmental concerns and the generative possibilities of painting further underpin her work.

The artwork in LIMINAL derives from McCosh’s direct engagement with the natural environment. She is interested in the transient and threshold experiences; fleeting times and latent spaces through which knowledge of the natural world is embodied by artist to be further transformed through studio interaction.  It is important to McCosh that her painting material is allowed some level of autonomy in creating her imagery.  This method of working positions matter as animate, rather than inanimate, and allows for a space of negotiation whereby unique creative effects and insights into matter can emerge; in this process the form of artist, environment and materials of production, co-emerge through the creative process.  The paintings become symbolic of the generative possibilities of matter, probing the process of material interaction as informative and relevant in increased understandings of the natural environment and material world.