Elizabeth Chisholm’s work—described as “what short stories might look like if we gave up on language”—draws on the surveillance gaze and speculative imagery to explore resilience, love, sex, death, sisterhood, regeneration, inherited power, gratitude, and loss. Her practice has evolved through an enduring fascination with context, nostalgia, and causation, often working with found CCTV footage and expanding it into imagined scenes.
Raised in Canada, Chisholm studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1980–81) before moving to the San Francisco Art Institute (1982–85), where she earned her BFA and won the inaugural award for Best Female Painter. After moving to Oxford in 1989 and raising two children, she completed postgraduate research in Continental Aesthetics at Middlesex University (1998–2000).
In 2017. Chisholm’s solo exhibition, The Age of Anxiety, C&C Art Gallery, London brought together her CCTV-based works with new explorations of the surveillance gaze. The artist lives and works in London.
Elizabeth Chisholm
Elizabeth is what we would call a painter’s painter: someone committed to the medium not as nostalgia but as an unstable, demanding site where affect, violence, tenderness, and historical tension can coexist. Working across acrylics and pro-markers, she approaches materials as questions rather than certainties. Her longstanding fascination with CCTV aesthetics - rooted in the rise of surveillance systems and crime imagery in 1990s Britain -reveals a practice attentive to the politics of vision, the ethics of looking, and the economies of vulnerability.
In the residency, Elizabeth used the time to rethink the architecture of her practice: to see her works side by side, to discover the threads that bind them, to allow softness where rigidity had once dominated. Her drawings accumulate through short, restless marks, producing portraits that hover between emergence and dissolution, acts of looking that reveal the impossibility of arriving at a singular truth.
Her paintings, conversely, unfold as dissonant psychoscapes where figuration drifts through dreamlike fields of colour, staging the instability of emotion, memory, and narrative.
Here, in the quiet studio, Elizabeth allowed herself to reconsider her formal decisions, to connect the encyclopaedic knowledge she carries with the intuitive gestures of her hand. The residency became a rare opportunity for her to suspend the pressures of London’s ecosystem and experiment with the productive unravelling of her own method.
Text by Akis Kokkinos, Visiting Curator, Launch Pad LaB, Autumn 2025.
Elizabeth Chisholm, Proximity To His Inheritance, Again. 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 161cm x 122cm.
Elizabeth Chisholm, Proximity to the Young Whistler, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 100cm. Proximity To The Man And The Moon, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 100cm.
Elizabeth Chisholm, Proximity To Her Wet Leg, Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 84cm, Proximity To Infinite Love, 2025/2024, Acrylic on canvas, 244cm x 183cm
Elizabeth Chisholm, Proximity To Infinite Love, Detail
Elizabeth Chisholm, Proximity To Perfecting The Cosmos, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 244cm x 183cm.