“Elizabeth Gower creates stunning abstract compositions from humble materials, with an emphasis upon translucency, fragility and impermanence. Her practice draws much of its content and form from the world of the everyday – commercial images and objects as well as familiar and domestic materials such as newspaper and tissue paper. Exploiting the associations evoked by such banal material, her work has often been connected with a feminist sensibility; however this framing should be countered with recognition of the strong aesthetic concerns at play.” (from: Sutton Gallery)

I think her idealism relates a lot to the critical framework that I just discover: Realism / Nouveau Realisme, identified a tendency or a desire for artists to “Attempt to bring art closer to life through material means.”. Similarly to Hannah Hoch, Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg and Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, using collage, assemblage, photographic imagery like photomontage and silk-screen juxtapositions to reproduce found images, expressing social commentaries. In Gower’s works I see rigid and orderly pattern that are not representational, yet putting emphasis to the commercial information, such as the price tags; the advertising typography, glossy surface in rotation of the information carefully selected to create repetition, revealing the concerns of consumerism and capitalism.