Elizabeth Shull: The Weight of It All

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present The Weight of It All, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Elizabeth Shull and her debut with the gallery. The exhibition features 31 intimately scaled drawings rendered in colored pencil on black paper. Each piece, measuring under ten inches and presented floating within 14 x 14-inch black frames, inspires a contemplative, almost devotional mode of viewing. Created between 2022 and 2025, these works unfold like fragments of memory or sensation with intricate layers of line, tone, and gesture.

Shull’s process is rooted in daily ritual—drawing as a form of attunement to both the internal and external, to the rhythms of nature, intuition, and the body’s tempo. Her visual language, though minimal, carries a presence that is precise and expansive. Working slowly and meditatively, she embraces the unknown through mark-making. “I am the bystander, the observer, the witness, attempting to make sense of things,” Shull reflects. For her, drawing is a mode of listening—a way to feel through experience rather than define it. Initially developed amid ecological and existential disruption—wildfires, a global pandemic, personal shifts—these works emerged from a reactionary quest to digest everything. Her use of black paper, rather than representing absence, becomes a generative space where light illuminates through layered, gentle marks. Repetition, restraint, and variation function here as quiet resistances to urgency, cultivating visual and emotional spaciousness.

The exhibition's titular work, The Weight of It All, was among the final pieces created. In it, a solitary figure rides a frothy wave, held in delicate tension between surrender and strength. “Because my work is time walking—moving through time, listening attentively to what I am curious about, and finding a way to document thoughts that may not repeat themselves—this drawing, among all of them, seems much like a momentary culmination,” Shull notes, “which is a curious thought given its title and what it can signify on a grand scale.” The drawing acknowledges the accumulated gravity of experience—its heaviness, its tenderness, and its quiet grace—without declaring closure. Another piece, Full Moon Within, centers a glowing orb in the chest of a translucent figure, suggesting inner radiance and the unseen, yet certain, energies that sustain us.