Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

Elizabeth Hoak-Doering’s current artistic practice adopts and transforms signs and inscriptions of a past condition humaine. As an anthropologist, Hoak-Doering is particularly interested in historical sites of changes of political identities or individual lives. Some years ago she began her work with ancient forms of graffiti by making rubbings of ships that were, for several centuries, scratched into the wall of an abandoned church on Cyprus.
Hoak-Doering’s current works are devoted primarily to the recent past, traces of which she has been offered abundantly in Berlin. In Gesundbrunnen she explored the texts and drawings scratched into the air-raid bunker there as thoroughly as the signatures and messages from prisoners in the cells of the Stasi prison, Hohenschönhausen. The artist did not  copy, re-draw or photograph the inscriptions – which have often survived only in fragments or have been painted over in places – with any documentary intention: instead, she took the signs, engravings and inscriptions from their background by tracing and frottage, using this in turn as a pattern for a re-enactment of the unknown writers’ gestures and a focus on the surface as a transmitting medium.
Her exhibition psychopomp takes its title from its ‘key’ piece, a cylinder seal following antique clay models but made of glass and designed by the artist.