One of our local famous Artowear participants, Liz Hoskings, is a very busy woman. Besides her commitment to her wearable arts practice, she has two small children, an older daughter studying in Wellington and she minds another child in the mornings and her god children in the afternoon.
All this, with many Artowear projects and ideas on the go. Her Mermaid costume ‘Tag and Release’, memorably created from thousands of bread tags stitched together with fishing line, was the People’s choice award winner in the 2010 Art to Wear competition in Raglan. She went on to claim the Supreme Winners Award at Re Style 2010 at Hamilton’s Founders Theatre.
Liz said that the idea for Tag and Release came from a card game she played with her son using the bread tags as tokens. The Te Mata Club, and her mother’s church group collected them for her and the completion of the garment took nearly three years and thousands of multi coloured tags.
Liz has always made things, she has always been immersed in arts. “It’s my life, something I’ve always done.” Both her parents have a love of arts and her mother is a practicing artist and very supportive of Liz’s work. Liz remembers her father concreting their driveway when she was very young and giving her a bucket of wet concrete to create sculptures and patterns on a piece of ply.
Liz’s Dad who sadly passed away last November, has always had influence and input into her creations. She describes him as a very creative person, good with his hands, very good at problem solving the technical issues that arise with her costume designs. Her very first costume was constructed with her Dad, in his shed.
They created Darth Veda from an old bucket, some black paint and her mother’s velvet cape. She caught the wearable art bug from that early experience.
Liz went to Waikato University, and trained as a set and costume designer with the Drama Department. Her first job was to create the moving theatre set for Outdoor Shakespeare at the Hamilton Garden’s festival. She has always made wearable art pieces and in the early days she participated regularly in the Waihi Wearable Arts Show with her daughter, Jordan.
Ecological and environmental awareness underpin Liz’s work. Each costume has a story. She has a strong commitment to re-use and she sources materials that would otherwise be discarded. She tries to bring each piece to life ‘with heart’, and says that it should be about giving or sharing an environmental message. Each piece represents a piece of herself, or something that means a lot to her. “You have to have confidence in your work or it’s too hard to put it out there otherwise.”
In the future Liz would love to submit a piece or pieces to WOW in Wellington. She would love to make work that makes people gasp and has an unending supply of creative ideas and inspirations she is working on. She can’t stop doing it, she loves the challenge of making complex pieces and says “ there are not enough shows and not enough time.”
For a woman with an already full family schedule , she is doing a great job of keeping her creative juices flowing. I am looking forward to seeing what she comes up with for this year’s Artowear show on June 9th at the Town Hall.
Tickets can be purchased from the Information Centre, Wainui Road.
Image from Stuff website
