Elizabeth Pulie

Elizabeth Pulie (b.1968 l. Sydney) has exhibited her work since 1989. Until 2002 a sense of art as decoration and commodity informed her decorative painting project, while from 2002 until 2006 she focused on a relational practice. Her work has recently opened to new media such as weaving, collage and embroidery. Recent exhibitions include ‘The National: New Australian Art’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017); ‘Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2017); ‘The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard’, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2018); ‘Bauhaus Now!’, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne (2019); ‘On Hessian’, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2020); and ‘Transplant’, SCA Gallery and Knulp, Sydney (2021). Pulie is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

#118 (Heaven in Love) 2021
HD video, colour, stereo, 1:45 minutes Cinematographer/Editor: Amir Dabaghian 

Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

Commissioned by the UNSW Galleries Commissioners Circle, 2021, for the exhibition, ‘Elizabeth Pulie: #117 (Survey)’.

#118 (Heaven in Love) was commissioned to accompany this survey exhibition and is one of the most recent works produced for Elizabeth Pulie’s End of Art project. It documents her movement through a Calligraphy Yoga sequence titled ‘Heaven in Love, ’ which she has practised since 2014. Combining Pulie’s parallel practices of yoga and art, the video functions as a musing on what it means to make art and be an artist contemporaneously, both in the sense of occupying present time and practising in the current period of contemporary art.

Exhibited as the conclusion to the survey exhibition, the video represents a trajectory through Pulie’s art practice, from highly productive states of making discrete objects to deliberately unyielding routines of movement that focus on being. The potentially endless repeatability of the video medium becomes synonymous with Pulie’s yogic movements and breathing. To comprehend the ‘End’ (of Art), Pulie occupies the looping, suggesting that all we are left with is the ritual of doing and being.