With the below tab panels you can preview the slide show content. The slide shows are available for full viewing from the links on the top menu bar at "Portfolio."

Red Sofa

The Red Sofa series was born in September 2002 when Mike and I began our lifelong journey together. The images are portraits of myself and Mike, and sometimes our cat TC, with the backdrop being our new red sofa in our St. Marys, GA home. It is a series of 5 photographs taken each month our first year together.

As described in the March/April 2004 issue of Arbus magazine by writer Valerie Carruthers, “With her signature style of creating staged images that seem candid, Liz presents herself and Mike in a gamut of moods, employing masks, feathers, lingerie and costumes as the theme demanded.”

Ms. Carruthers’ words are an accurate description of my style and intent.

This series is a representation of my first digital work. It was first shown in an exhibit entitled “Fallen Fruit: Four Female Perspectives” at Spiller Vincenty Gallery in Jacksonville, FL, 2004.

[WO]MANDALA, 1996

            This is a series of photographs of my daughter, Hettie, and some of her close friends made during their early adolescence. Also included are photographs of my sister, Holli, and some of my close friends. The series is soft, ethereal, and depicts both the beauty and strength of woman.
I always like to photograph people with whom I have a close connection. The sharing and relationships between myself and the woman photographed is an important aspect in my photography. They contribute to the success of the images.
This show was first exhibited at Leonora Vega Gallery, New York, NY in 1997. The following text accompanied exhibitions of this series:
[WO]MANDALA
Women are in this dream. Their bodies are made mostly of light. When I think I can see them, they disappear.
We are not frozen smiles, documented cheekbones. In our gestures, we are known. Some of us go back to ancient times. Offer your wheat, Demeter. The stone goddess adorning the garden becomes flesh and breathes. Touch her skin. Another statue hops down from her pedestal and dances around the fountain laughing. I laugh too.
Woodnymphs run by, windblown. Others are attracted to the light, which swallows various heads, parts of bodies. I don’t know what is inside the light; I only know that when seen, it is irresistible, and some of us allow ourselves to be sucked up into it. We question the solid, and the dream is more real than waking.

Hollis Hampton-Jones, 1996

 

Bisbee Red

Bisbee Red is currently a series of staged portraits of myself and my friend, Ludmilla. The photographs feature us in various environmental settings around Bisbee, Arizona. The “Red” refers to our red wigs worn in each photograph, which alters our identities.

I have roamed Bisbee as a red-head in various wardrobe styles and have not been recognized by friends who have known me for four years. That has intrigued me...I love the idea of exploring an altered identity.

The series also explores the continuity and changes of women over the century: Victorian to modern. Locations range from a turn-of-the-century saloon eluding to “Old-West Bisbee” when the city was in it’s heyday as a prosperous mining town, to present day Bisbee and some of its graffiti walls.

Symphonia: Visions of Saints, 1997

This is an interpretive series of visions and dreams of Medieval Woman Saints and is based primarily on text from Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature edited by Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, 1986. The series was shot with black and white slide film. A small sampling have been scanned to date.

About the Saints
Angela of Foligno: During a period of penitence she experiences her feelings of guilt for her sins and envisions herself going through the town square naked with fish and meat hanging from her neck. In another vision, the Holy Spirit revealed his love to her as if she were his sweet bride. She was courted as she headed on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Francis in Assisi.
Blessed Margarita: In a vision of passion, she describes an inexplicable feeling of sweetness in which her eyes are flooded with tears and her heart with grief as she scrutinizes Christ’s wounds.
Christina of Markyate: As a young girl she secretly pledges her vows of virginity to Christ in a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and Burthred is unable to touch her.
Joan of Arc: At age 14, she began hearing voices, later along with blazes of light. The voices increased and she was able to identify the saints calling her to the path of patriotism that lead to her death at the stake.
Saint Leoba: She dreamed an endless purple thread came from her mouth. She tried to gather it with her hands. An elder nun claimed this a prophetic dream. Leoba would be called to spread the word of Christianity in Europe.
Marie d’Oignies: In devotion she nurtured the baby Jesus and held the Holy Son of the Virgin to her breast.

Tri-Color Trilogy
Blue
Yellow
Red

(A Romance in Color)

This small series of 15 images was done in 1999 and completed in 2002. The Blue images are four portraits of my daughter, Hettie, and one self-portrait. These were originally called Portraits of Genevieve. They were done in 1999 and then just put aside. I returned to these images in late 2001 and included them in Tri-Color Trilogy, Blue, Yellow, and Red.

These images are soft, ethereal, romantic images as are most of my photographs.

Florissimo
(digitally enhanced series of photographs printed on textured silk)

Florissimo is a series I began in January 2008. It celebrates the beauty of flowers as does the flower exhibit, Florissimo, held annually in Dijon, France.

My florals are inspired by the beauty of the varied colors, textures, shapes and intricacies of each individual flower. Many of the flowers are dry pressed before I photograph them. Printing them on textured silk highlights the brilliance of these graceful gifts of nature.

Lured Southwest – Arizona Landscapes

My husband, Mike, and I moved to southern Arizona from south Georgia in the spring of 2005. The mountains, desert and wide open space amazed me and still do. We often do day trips and explore the area. I enjoy photographing the incredibly varied terrain and love to explore the transformations from season to season.

Having spent most of my career photographing people whom I am close to, and doing self-portraits, this was the beginning of new explorations in subject matter, and created a challenge for me in learning how to stylistically photograph landscapes in the same style as my portraits.

Surreal Scapes

In traveling southeast Arizona, I felt inspired to capture some of the “surreality” I often experience. Having worked at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL in the 1980s, I have always been drawn to the surreal.

Near a little ghost town called Gleeson, there is “this rattlesnake place” out in the isolated desert where a couple have collected a varied assortment of, well, lets say about everything including the kitchen sink. This locale was the inspiration to begin this more ethereal, surreal scapes series.

Infrareal

In 2008, I became intrigued by digital infrared photography and the surreal quality it gives an image. This series incorporates digital infrared photography along with Lomo inspired borders.

Borderline

I live 8 miles from the Mexican border in Southeast Arizona. Immigration is a controversial issue here as across the U.S.

Border crossers here are referred to as “Illegal Immigrants”, “Undocumented Aliens”, or by those sympathetic to their plight, “Migrants”.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Tucson Sector, accumulate statistics from five Southeastern Arizona Counties. From January 1, 2007 – June 30, 2007, there were 241,229 Illegal Immigrants caught in this sector, attempting to find entrance to the U.S. Of these, 222,307 were sent home; 18, 922 were detained. There were 101 found dead in the desert and mountains.

This black and white photographic series with text depicts the loneliness of the border region and leaves to one’s imagination what an attempt to cross the border might be like. There are miles of desert with thorny vegetation, mountains steep with no paths, barbed wire fences, border walls, and scorching temperatures. There are Border Patrol and air surveillance. It must be shear desperation and determination for one to attempt this crossing.

There are also flagged water stations for the parched that are filled by U.S. locals living near the border who want to help the immigrants survive the desert heat.

This series poses the question, what is the answer to this complex problem?

This is a new, ongoing body of work for me.

These digital photographs are printed in black & white. There are many gray, somber tones in these images which reflect to me the mood of the border.

Liz Hampton, 2007

Currently Not for Sale.

Encaustic/Mixed Media

Photography has been my medium for over 25 years; however encaustic and mixed media have captured my attention of late. I am interested in exploring the many possibilities combining these mediums: photography and encaustic, along with collage.

Encaustic painting involves using heated beeswax, resin, and sometimes colored pigments that is applied to a surface and reheated to fuse the paint, creating artwork with a beautiful luminosity. One can fuse multiple layers combining photographs and mixed media. Encaustic based art is extremely durable due to the fact that beeswax is impervious to moisture. Because of this it will not deteriorate, yellow, or darken.

Encaustic paintings date back to the Greek and Roman empires. Examples still maintain their original brilliant color today.

This gallery consists of my first experiments with encaustic after having taken several workshops in Encaustic/Mixed Media.