Liz Maugans, Take Me Home
Liz Maugans calls herself “a text-based artist who likes to tell stories with very limited dialogue.”
As co-founder of Zygote Press, a non-profit studio and gallery, Maugans is known for working in fine-art printing and for spreading the gospel of printmaking through educational programs. Her own print work often uses wit to pose questions about serious issues in society. Some prints use only text, while others play with abstract forms, layered textures and representational drawings.
But her art extends beyond the press, too. “Take Me Home,” the sculpture she shows in the PNC SmartHome, is built from what Maugans calls “scrap crap” — wood she has found here and there.
And there’s a direct link between materials and content, she says.
“My work is about the challenges that people face in a relationship, in the current economy, etc.,” Maugans says. “Resiliency and staying power and the bittersweet certainly come out in the work.”
The SmartHome sculpture, she says, “is about an adoption of sorts: Take me home and I will hang here and do the rest of the work. The base is from a broken stool top, the other parts are from shutters from the old Fuller House in Bay Village and other detritus I found on lawns around my own home.”
That’s typical of how Maugans approaches her creative life.
“I recycle old shutters, broken kids’ toys, things I garbage-pick,” she says. “I generally try to resuscitate orphaned objects and breathe new life and meaning into them.”
Sustainability — the core of the art installed in the SmartHome — is embedded in Maugans’ work ethic.
“I often feel terrible when I have to buy a sub-straight,” she says. ”There seems to be such a surplus of stuff lying around, available on people’s front lawns, and at great places like Zerolandfill. ” (Zerolandfill is a nonprofit organization that collects unused materials from builders and manufacturers and makes them available to artists and arts educators.)
Maugans majored in printmaking and painting at Kent State University, and earned her master’s degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
“In college, not having a lot of dough, (recycling) was my salvation,” she says. It also affords me to tell an existing tale about that little morsel I recovered.”
Artwork shown: Take Me Home, Liz Maugans
