Elizabeth Benson Denbighshire, United Kingdom

• 
• 

  Back to profiles Invite to apply

I’m Elizabeth Benson, a UK-based artist working between textile and sculpture. I explore how cloth, dye and fibre respond to contact, pressure and time, using natural dyes, tannins and iron to create layered works where colour and form emerge through interaction rather than control.

My practice explores material as an active participant rather than a passive medium. I work with cloth, dye, fibre and found elements as systems of interaction, focusing on how they behave when brought into contact, how they absorb, resist, transfer and transform. What emerges is less an image than an event: a surface shaped by process.

I primarily use natural dyes, particularly tannin-rich plant matter and iron. These materials are inherently unstable in combination, producing shifts in tone that cannot be fully controlled. I work with this instability deliberately, allowing reactions to occur through proximity and timing rather than fixed application. Colour develops through processes such as soaking, wrapping, compressing and layering, so that it becomes inseparable from structure.

Fabric plays a central role in this. Different cloths hold and release tension in distinct ways. Silk organza folds and resists, creating structural pressure; butter muslin softens and absorbs; linen scrim holds a more open, porous quality. By combining these materials, I create surfaces where forces accumulate—where one fabric buckles under another, or where dye travels unevenly across a shifting ground. This leads to a way of working that sits between textile and sculpture. The works often remain wall-based, but they push toward relief, holding depth through layering and compression. I’m interested in that threshold, where something is no longer purely surface, but not fully object either.

Conceptually, I think of the work as operating through a kind of material memory. The cloth records handling, the dye records time, and the structure records pressure. These traces accumulate to form something that feels bodily, even when it is abstract. There’s an ongoing dialogue between interior and exterior forces, between what is imposed and what emerges.

Landscape enters the work not as imagery but as condition. I often use locally sourced plant materials, so the colour carries a direct relationship to place. The processes I use, soaking, weathering, oxidising, also mirror natural cycles, allowing the work to develop in ways that feel aligned with environmental rhythms.

Alongside larger pieces, I maintain a sustained practice of small-scale studies. These act as a form of research, where I test variables such as iron strength, tannin concentration, duration, and physical manipulation. This iterative approach allows me to build an understanding of how materials behave over time, while keeping the work open-ended.

Across all of this, I’m interested in the point where authorship becomes shared, where the material is not simply shaped, but is shaping in return. The work is not about illustrating an idea, but about creating the conditions for something to occur.