FOURTEEN

Elizabeth Pulie has been exploring the possibilities of painting over the last three decades. Her research-led practice places equal emphasis on the conceptual and the material and her work often possesses a distinctive decorative sensibility. Pulie’s practice deftly flirts with the line between fine art and craft to examine the philosophy, aesthetic value and commodification of decorative arts and female labour. Her early work was grounded in large-scale acrylic paintings and in more recent years she has turned to experimentation with new materials and processes, most notably textiles, working fabrics such as hessian, jute, cotton and linen into capes, banners and large-scale, graphically patterned and overtly sculptural paintings.

Between 1988 and 2003, Pulie produced more than two hundred numbered paintings that were overtly decorative, inspired by a variety of historically inflected design motifs and patterns. 'FOURTEEN' 1990 is a striking example from this early body of work. The surface of this painting is exquisite – the colours pulsate and arabesques dance across the canvas. A decorative pattern, seemingly taken from an outmoded domestic context, is reappropriated and simplified into crisp edged shapes within a dynamic composition of vivid colour and looping lines. The foreground and background oscillate between positive and negative space and the swirls, colour and flourishes inject a sense of whimsical freshness. Pulie says of the works from this series, ‘I intended them to be empty, without a theme or ideas, and to contain only decorative motifs rather than, for example, representational images.’