Elizabeth Albrecht - Multimedia

A Tent For 婆婆 (Grandmother)

Textile Installation

61.5 x 41 x 48 in.

2023

A tent, knitted by my grandmother and filled with the objects I imagine to be in her home. I constructed this tent from pieces she had knit in pandemic isolation over the past year that she had given to me and my mom. I made her a home because I know she doesn’t feel at home in her nursing home and has struggled to find a sense of home in Canada. The two of us don’t talk and she doesn’t know I made this, but to me, it feels like a connection to her that I’ve never had before.

Coral Pink (2023)

A poem and film to accompany A Tent For 婆婆 (Grandmother)

just too much to bear

Digital Image

2023

~ A token from her past reveals too many memories ~

A visual narrative piece made from photographs of hand-created textures manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and digitally cut out to form a series of images. The stuffed bear represents a wad of strong memories and nostalgia that a young woman keeps with her to help her relive what has already been buried by time.

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Inheritance

Coloured pencil on paper, ink on sewn ricepaper

13 x 8 in.

2023

I often feel distant from my extended family as their quietness and conservative values seem nearly opposite to mine. Strangely, I also feel they have shaped many aspects of who I am. For this piece, I used two mediums from both sides of my family to express our cultural backgrounds. I created quilt designs to represent the significance of quilting in my Mennonite family and Chinese calligraphy to represent my Chinese family and the traditional art they learned as children. The outer sleeves are calligraphy paper where I have written the Chinese characters that reflect the meaning of each quilt. The sheets are sewn along the edges to create pockets that mimic the pages of old Chinese calligraphy practice books that have paper pockets for inserts the user can trace. The quilts inside are drawn through the layering of coloured pencils and feature blended compositions of classic quilt patterns and unconventional images used to convey the quilt’s meaning.

Treasure

Cardboard, acrylic gel medium transfer, ink drawing photographed, printed and imposed on aluminum, ceramic, wood, knitted textile, glass and linen

9 x 12 in.

2023

When both of my grandmothers moved to long-term care homes, they experienced feelings that their personal belongings had been stolen from them. A common experience among residents with dementia. The sudden loss of one's residence, furniture, clothes, personal space and autonomy when moving into long-term care can be incredibly debilitating.

I sought to capture the ability of one’s material belongings to heal through a keepsake box of household objects printed onto a sample of the material they are made from. I used acrylic gel medium to transfer photographs of ink drawings onto their respective material. Viewers can remove the objects from the box and touch each object, engaging in a sensory understanding of what they are, how they feel, and their roles in our well-being. When they are done, the lid is placed on top and the objects are kept secure and private.

Night Visions

India ink on paper, scanned and digitally manipulated

9 x 12 in. per page

2023

Night Visions is about the way we lose a sense of our own vulnerability once we take on the role of protecting someone else. It's about the fluidity of our own self-image determined by our surroundings.

Film Week Posters

Digital Image

2023

A set of posters made for Etobicoke School of the Arts springtime "Film Week" film festival.

Placeholder

Liquid watercolour on paper, paper mache, metal wire

10 x 10 x 10 in.

2023

I remember the spaces I no longer inhabit by projecting my memories of them onto the spaces around me. This allows me to feel the memory around my body giving me a stronger sense of what that time was like. I created a sculpture that would help me with this process of remembering when I no longer remember my current bedroom. To create it, I positioned myself in the middle of my room and drew details of specific angles from all sides of the space using liquid watercolour. I combined these images in a 3D figure so that if I were to place this object where I was seated in my room, it would reflect the angle at which each side is pointed.

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When You Remove a Piece of the Story

Archival pigment print

Each segment is 3.75 x 3.75 in. (x32)

2021

Snippets from an evening at home. Some with captions or small stories written on the back, others with no context at all. The photographs were once connected in one full role but have, and can be torn along the lines of needle-punched holes separating each one. What happens when you remove a photograph from the story? How does the story change? At what point as you tear the photographs away does the sense of home become lost?

Dipstick

Graphite and India ink on rice paper

53 x 24 in.

2023

As a child, I remember walking in a creek near my home and being taught to measure the water level with a stick, observing the height at which the water soaked into the wood. With this simple technique, wherever I stepped, I could ensure the water would not flow into the top of my rain boots or hit me above my knees. As I fail to grasp the nature of the technology I use daily, this image serves as a reminder of the simple tools and principles that still surround me. I drew an image of a large stick on rice paper, done observationally and to scale. I washed the piece in diluted India ink to create the effect of dipping the stick in water. The patterns the India ink formed on rice paper offer the effect of water while emulating the texture of the stick.

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