Elizabeth Burmann Littin’s exhibition Pupila opens with an invitation to gaze through a pair of watery mollusc eyes. Borrowing the form of a tower viewer—fixed binoculars common in tourist destinations—her invertebrate glasses act as an intermediary between the outside world and the artist’s practice of worldmaking. Bringing together references from feminist science-fiction and decorative allusions to Art Nouveau the artist constructs an industrial aqueous landscape where ancient stalagmites, Jurassic shells and gelatinous beings co-exist.

With a strong knowledge of craft-based methods, Burmann Littin is a disobedient student. The central sculpture beso vegetal (2023) at once resembles a fragmented oyster shell and the  bisection of a limb, anthropomorphized using rubber and stained glass. Like a beckoning call from a distant room, her seductive works ask you to meet them on the level of the floor, the ceiling and the wall. Combining organic materials sourced across Chile, Rhode Island and Ontario with steel manufactured in Hamilton, she muddies the separation between humans and nature.  As the artist shares “everything is a beast in the wrong environment,” here beast and beauty are open to interpretation.

Contrasting the cold materiality of steel, an atmospheric pink light evokes the warmth of a perpetual sunset with the potential of a sunrise, or a dawn beckoning an unknown time. Recalling the triviality of human time to earthly—and more than earthly—time, her reconfigurations of creaturely life perform a slippery, anachronistic dance like an eyelid flickering over a pupila (pupil). 

Elizabeth Burmann Littin (b. 1992, Santiago, CL) is an artist working at the intersection of installation, intervention and interdisciplinary research. She holds a Master of Fine Art in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2020) and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fine Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2015). Her work explores reactions and forms of decay that emerge from the encounters amongst nature, industries, bodies and environs. Burmann Littin materially intertwines knowledge borrowed from biology and cooking alongside applications of traditional fine arts techniques such as glass and metalwork. Her installations aim to dissolve the normative view of nature and the hierarchies that distance human production from ecology— that encourage curiosity in non-dominant materialities— to unveil new dimensions and possibilities of coexistence.

Her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums such as the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile; the CCU Gallery, Santiago de Chile; the Museum of Visual Arts, Santiago de Chile; Galeria Patricia Ready, Santiago de Chile; Local Arte Contemporáneo Santiago de Chile, amongst others. In March 2024, she will present her first solo institutional exhibition Concha en ácido at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago) curated by Sergio Soto Maulén with the support from the Chilean cultural council FONDART. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the National Cultural Council, Chile - Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerillos.

Accompanying her studio practice, she recently authored article on the oceanic turn and material feminisms that was published in the Feminist Review, United Kingdom (2022), titled 'Oceans'. Her current practice delves into the study of aqueous materialities as entities that flow, erode, and nourish, undoing the rigid categorizations of human and nature.