Successful AER resident, Elizabeth Cardozo-Richards, shares her letter of motivation for the Domaine de Boisbuchet residency

I’m a multidisciplinary artist, my practice includes many mediums such as sculpture, installation, performance, audio and time-based works. During my undergrad I made works which referenced and explored the body and space. An example of this was using an ultrasound of my nieces heartbeat within my sisters uterus and recontextualising this in a different space. I have been consistently fascinated with space and how we occupy it, particularly this inside outside dialogue we have within a wider context and with-in the “bidirectional communication between the body and mind” (from, The body keeps the score). In 2018 I recorded an empty apartment space (between moving my grandparents moving out), this deconstruction and construction of new forms enables me to retrieve lost memory within the walls of the space. There is an attempt in these works to abstract memory in the process of the archive, thinking about inhabited spaces and the transfer of this process through different mediums. I have also looked at gestures such as washing the face to examine our habitual movements bringing the viewer directly into the work.

Since then I have been looking at sculpture and anthropological signifiers (more specifically using domestic paraphernalia) and exploring their meaning through material poetics. I do this through the recontextualization of objects and site specificity. Space is a very important component to my practice, this manifests in architectural interventions. How the work inhabits space is key, as a practitioner with a background in dance it’s an integral part of understanding and navigating space, through my body I am able to construct these domestic sculptures with a consciousness to the space and materiality. The material composition of my sculptures seek to recover memory. I see the works I use as part of a wider conversation with the archive, whether it be digital or physical, and an attempt to archive intangible actions and motifs. I use "the everyday" to employ notions of time, place, temporality and inhabiting space. This creates a type of ethnographic discovery. In an attempt to mine "the everyday", I create a form of object cinema. In my research I question the function of art outside the "gallery". This exploration is played out through architectural interventions and object monuments. My process is material driven, surrounding a performance with materials through assemblage. My sculptures are made from found and discarded materials, which I then reactivate by using forces such as gravity and tension. More recently I have been exploring the body as a tool to manipulate materials, and in doing so perform within them, to make shapes, sounds and movement. This development can be shown in my recent performance called 1 Tone Sand Bag, which was featured in the online Late at Tate event in 2020. In reflecting on my previous works there has been a subconscious interest in the mind and body and its inner sensory landscape. I want to explore the body as a way to uncover memory through improvisation and response to music and sounds, taking inspiration from the chance happening at Black Mountain College in 1952, with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg.