Eliza Kentridge
Eliza Kentridge was born in 1962 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and moved to England in 1988, where she studied drawing and printmaking at Oxford Polytechnic. She has lived and worked in Wivenhoe, Essex since 1990, where she co-runs Wivenhoe Printworks. Her practice incorporates drawing, sewing, sculpture and writing, with embroidery the main pillar of her work over the last thirty years, drawing on sources such as family photographs, news images and films.
Kentridge has an ongoing connection with Dieu Donne Paperworks in New York; an artist book, Selected Signs, made in collaboration with them, is held in the Library of Congress. Her book of poems Signs For An Exhibition was published by Modjaji Books (Cape Town) in 2015 and was joint winner of the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Literature in 2016. In 2022 some of the poems were turned into a song cycle by composer Philip Miller.
Artist Statement
My ongoing project, alongside collage, printmaking and pieces stitched on fabric, is the embroidering on a matrix made up of dried, used teabags. This is an act of recycling, but, more importantly, a measure of years spent alongside my elderly father, in his London house, where tea is drunk and time passes. In 2024, a large installation of these hand-embroidered teabags was sold by Cecilia Brunson Projects, London to an art foundation in America.