ELIZABETH HALL: VIRIDITAS
/Elizabeth Hall: Viriditas
November 8, 2022 - January 8, 2023
Buchanan Partners Gallery @ Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas
Exhibition Reception: Wednesday, December 14, 4 - 6pm
Join us for a casual evening reception at the Hylton Performing Arts Center, Manassas to celebrate Elizabeth Hall’s exhibition Viriditas on view through January 8, 2023. Refreshments provided. Directions to the Hylton: https://hyltoncenter.org/plan-your-visit/getting-here
“With their Latin names, folklore, constituents and traditions, herbs and their remedies hold a life force with which we are meant to align. This living green abundance surrounds our existence, to comfort, heal, and restore.”
About the Exhibition
Elizabeth Hall: Viriditas features the artist and herbalist’s recent paintings and mixed-media works, which investigate the relationship between individual plants and their affinity for human bodily systems.
To develop an empirical understanding of these connections, Hall begins the act of drawing while imbibing each herb. This visual transference of the healing power of plants became the basis for her series, Viriditas, or “greening power,” in which drawings of bodily organs and systems are interwoven with botanical imagery related to the herbs and their effects.
Hall’s imagery and quest for understanding merges scientific, spiritual, and physical forms of knowledge. Her work is consciously indebted to visionary historical figures such as Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th Century polymath and nun who believed that human existence suffers in the absence of this spiritual and essential verdure. Modernity has seen humanity increasingly disconnect from this sacred balance, losing respect for nature, and, in turn, for each other. For Hall, like von Bingen, well-being and vitality are attainable through a reconnection with nature and its “greening power.”
About the Artist:
Elizabeth Hall is an artist, herbalist, and educator who lives with her family in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Elizabeth and her husband co-run SporaStudios, which integrates their interests in the visual arts, performance, ecology, permaculture, herbalism, social and environmental justice, and the art of everyday life.
Hall holds a BA in painting and drawing from Meredith Collage and an MFA in painting from East Carolina University. She has exhibited internationally including venues such as the Betty Rymer Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago; FADO Performance Art Center, Toronto; and the Internationales Waldkunst Zentrum (IWZ), Darmstadt. Hall has worked as a commission artist for over two decades, specializing in portraiture for clients throughout the United States. She currently teaches drawing in George Mason University’s School of Art.
