Elizabeth Tomos profile picture

Programme:

Art - PhD/MPhil

Start date:

Sep-20

Mode of study:

Part time

Research title:

Printmaking and Performance Art

Biography

Elizabeth Tomos is an artist, arts educator, and climate activist. She is currently leading on the Northamptonshire Creative Climate Action Fund project as a means to discover ways that art can support people to engage with the ecological crisis. Her practice operates under the title Perform//Print, which is a hybrid method of making art that draws on the techniques, methods, and processes of printmaking and collides them with live and performance art practices. Printmaking and performance art are highly appropriate mediums for navigating the current crises as they both have long histories of political dissent, are both able to hybridise and layer multiple elements, they can be queered, they can be temporal and fragile and speak to loss. So, they matter as a way to navigate and express ecological concerns.

Elizabeth Tomos has taught in Higher Education for over ten years and is currently a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University. She is also the director and curator for Trans-states, which is a small community interest company dedicated to the scholarship of contemporary occulture and esotericism.

Teaching

Elizabeth Tomos has taught critical and contextual studies modules for a variety of Art and Design degrees, as well as teaching on a range of studio modules on Fine Art and affiliated courses. She has been an undergraduate dissertation and final major project supervisor.

Research

We are facing an ecological crisis, which is also really a human crisis, a crisis of how we live, how we operate, how we treat each other and our beautiful but scarred planet. The events of the next few short years will be the greatest universal threat human beings have ever faced and the one that shapes whether or not we have a future as a species. 

As an artist and researcher, tackling the ecological crisis is now the only thing that matters. It is everything. It is complex. It is political. It is tied up with every other form of social justice. This is a mycelial network of interconnecting issues that need sensitive and intersectional solutions. This is the work art needs to do, to be “at work in the ruins” (Dougald Hine).

Since the advent of post-modernity, we are experiencing an increasingly fast, performative, and mediated culture which bears much critical reflection, particularly in light of the ecological crisis. The body’s capacity to both learn and to create knowledge outside of and in critique of systems of power: the body is both tool, agent, and object. The philosophical turn to practices of embodiment is a means to engage politically in countering the neo-liberal and capitalist reductionism of human value to productivity and units of commerce. Post-human and new materialist philosophies provide frameworks for re-evaluating our relationship to ourselves, to each other and to our world.