Elizabeth Hilton

Education & Formation

Born

West Boise, Idaho — farmland, dusty roads, abandoned houses and barns

Fifth of six children — summers spent exploring, fort-building, wandering canals

2001

BFA — Boise State University

Emphasis in oils and mixed media

Post-BFA

Practice shifted steadily toward collage

Vintage wallpaper, magazines, books, newspapers, maps, sheet music

Exhibitions

Ongoing

JG Art Gallery + Events — Bainbridge Island & Park City

2022

"Menagerie" solo — Visual Arts Collective

Garden City, Idaho — August–September 2022

Ongoing

ArtLifting — online platform

Process & Subjects

Method

Start with surface texture and an image — let the piece finish itself

Layer upon layer: gouge, scratch, add

Subjects

Animals and creatures — birds, raccoons — emerging from collage layers

Each creature assembled from period-specific paper and imagery

Nostalgia

Soft pinks, turquoise, yellowed book pages — colors of 1970s–80s West Boise

"The right shade of grey from a 1962 appliance advertisement"

Materials

Paper

Vintage wallpaper · magazines · old books · newspapers · maps · sheet music

Found paper as primary medium — the specific colors and content matter

Paint

Oils over and through the collage ground

Graphite, pencil, acrylic may appear in layers

Surface

Panels — not canvas

The physical support carries the depth of the accumulated layers

Works at JG

Works

Circles · Sellarse Jay · Cosmos

Untitled (Triptych) · Kitty

In the Artist’s Words

Life is a process of adding and taking away, over and over again.

Layer upon layer, we gouge and scratch and add until we are left with something beautiful for all the stress it has undergone.