Daily Inspiration: Meet Liz Stringer

Today we’d like to introduce you to Liz Stringer.

Hi Liz , so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
There was a moment during my undergraduate period at UC San Diego where I thought I would be a doctor. I was studying human biology with an emphasis in microbiology, but always loved making visual artwork. During my undergraduate I took a couple of art courses. I fell in love with contemporary art and knew it needed to be part of my life ever since. From there it was a long road of trying out different careers as a medical illustrator, non-profit work, an educator with museums and high/middle school and then finally deciding that I seriously needed to pursue art making.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It was smooth in a sense, where I followed the various opportunities in the visual art world that would open before me. I love talking about art and getting others to share their passion. I love forming communities around the arts. However it took near death experience to make me focus on what direction I wanted to pursue in my life, which was making art as a contemporary artist.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I make large sculpture or installations that are visually inspired by the biomorphic, gothic, metamorphosis and science fantasy. My work begins with the body—not as a fixed form, but as something porous, unstable, and constantly negotiating its boundaries. I’m interested in how bodies hold knowledge, memory, labor, and vulnerability, and how they change over time through pressure, care, damage, and repair. Working across ceramics, sculpture, and installation, I build forms that feel somewhere between organism and structure, ornament and infrastructure, objects that seem to be in the middle of becoming something else.

Ceramics is at the center of my practice because it allows me to think through making as a kind of drawing. I work quickly and intuitively, responding to the resistance and pliability of clay. Gestures accumulate, surfaces wrinkle and stretch, and forms grow through touch rather than planning. This process creates a direct feedback loop between my body and the material, where thinking happens through the hands. I’m drawn to this immediacy. The way clay records movement, hesitation, and pressure, leaving behind a physical trace of attention and care.

Alongside clay, I often work with materials like steel, copper, and aluminum foil. I’m interested in how organic and industrial materials undergo similar transformations: they’re heated, stressed, crystallized, and reconstituted. These parallel processes allow me to think about energy, labor, and time as shared conditions across bodies and systems. The objects that emerge feel hybrid-like: part architectural support, part bodily fragment; suggesting scaffolding, protection, or containment without ever fully resolving into something stable.

Conceptually, my work is informed by science fiction, biopolitics, and feminist theory, as well as my background in microbiology. I often think at multiple scales at once: cells, bodies, crowds, and infrastructures. At the microscopic level, everything is relational-proteins, fluids, membranes constantly interacting-and I see this as a metaphor for how we exist socially and politically. Everything is semi-permeable.

Ultimately, I think of my sculptures as “cultural bodies.” They hold tension between inside and outside, intimacy and exposure, fragility and endurance. I invite viewers to move around the sculptures, imagine their life, or feel their own bodies in relation to them. I’m interested in how sculpture can function as a site of encounter; where material, memory, and collective experience intersect.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I love LA‘s energy. It is a city that is full of various niches. When you drive all over it, because you have to drive, you can see how expensive but interconnected it is. There’s an incredible community in the arts and I love them dearly. They are support system when I find myself in these very interesting times. As someone born in Long Beach, CA and have always lived in Baja California, I love the inherent aesthetics it brings to the table in my work. However, sometimes it gets a little pricey to be an artist living in LA who makes sculpture.

Pricing:

• contact the artist

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lizstringer.info
• Instagram: @surgeon_hands

Image Credits
Images courtesy of ARTIFAX