Biography

Oregon artist Elizabeth Brigham’s passion and prowess for making art was noted and encouraged by teachers from kindergarten on. Throughout her career she has remained largely self taught, though she received early formal training through classes at Portland Community College and The Evergreen State College.

At age eleven Libbi, as she prefers to be called, moved to Portland with her mom, an architecture and art student who cluttered their small apartment with bits of paper, card-stock and colored mat board left over from her class assignments. Libbi spent all her spare time fashioning objects out of these scraps. One, a multi-colored tandem bicycle, sold at a show in Portland’s Pearl District to local art collector Michael Powell and the addiction that would determine her life’s steadfast path was born.

What followed for the young artist were phases of working in ceramics, various painting media and various forms of sculpture, including the buxom coiled figures she dubbed ‘Wire Women,’ which sold very well and supported her habit. In her mid twenties Libbi and her mother opened a studio/gallery called ‘Art and Sol’ in southern Oregon where Libbi became locally well-known for the wire figures as well as painted furniture and large papier mâché animals. She produced numerous commissioned works and taught papier mâché classes to children at the local art museum.

Then one day six years ago Libbi happened to pick up a family photo of herself, her brothers and her sister as young children. The nostalgic scene included her childhood ‘dream’ home, complete with a Victorian farmhouse and barn, an old John Deere tractor and the numerous and various farm animals that had become family pets. Ms. Brigham felt inspired to render the photo into something larger and more wonderful, but at the time she was still sculpting in wire and painting furniture, and both were selling well in galleries in Oregon, Colorado and New York. The farm picture haunted her muse, however, and eventually she picked up a pair of scissors and began the process that has consumed her creative energy ever since, a unique and fascinating form of paper collage.

Over the years Libbi Brigham’s paper collages have become as diverse as her array of small, sharp scissors and her collection of unusual papers. Always colorfast, these papers range from brightly colored commercial sheets to earthy, natural fibers and hand made papers. She also uses a special archival glue that will never lose its clarity and flexibility.

Outside Portland, Ms. Brigham’s award-winning paper collages have sold at the New Gallery in Bandon, Oregon, and at the gift shop at the Bandon Dunes Resort. Her first Portland show, ‘Photosynthesis,’ held in 2003 at a Portland coffee shop and gallery, was a sellout. The sequel show, ‘Progression,’ was equally successful, and was followed by her exclusive ongoing show at a fine pan Pacific restaurant and gallery in Portland’s high end Beaumont district.