What is the best thing that I love about my work?
I get to obsess over things most people would consider completely unreasonable. Light entering a room incorrectly, the emotional difference between cream paper and bright white paper. I also love that no two projects demand the same version of your brain. Some require strategy, some require instinct, some require emotional sensitivity, and some require you to survive on caffeine. It keeps life interesting.
What is my idea of happiness?
I do prefer the word joy because happiness tends to feel transactional at times. Joy requires you to pay attention. A nostalgic afternoon where the sunlight catches certain surfaces in a way that strikes an emotional chord. The realization that I am deeply loved and supported by extraordinary people. And always, the smell of something baking in the oven.
Picture credits: George Joseph Lagidze
What is my greatest fear?
Becoming cynical enough to no longer remain curious. My father always used to say, “May your church be to question and may your religion be truth.” Curiosity keeps the soul porous. The moment we stop exploring, doubting, and re-evaluating, we begin hardening into certainty long before we are physically gone. To question is its own moral discipline.
What is the trait that I most deplore in myself?
I tend to be gullible at times, which can be naive. But the older I get, the more I realize discernment is its own form of emotional intelligence. Still, I would rather remain slightly too open-hearted than live life assuming the worst in people.
Which living persons in my profession do I most admire?
London-based multidisciplinary artist, Petra Storrs. I admire the fluidity of her creativity. There is something very satisfying about watching someone commit fully to their own strange visual logic. You can sense the materials, the problem-solving, the improvisation, the slightly chaotic inventiveness underneath it all. It has “fingerprints” on it, and I like that. It feels alive.
What is the thing that I dislike the most in my work?
Administration. And I say that with full awareness that structure and discipline are necessary for creative work to survive materially in the real world. Systems do matter, but I still can’t find myself enjoying three hours inside spreadsheets.
When and where was I the happiest, in my work?
This is probably going to sound like some propaganda for collective suffering, but some of my happiest moments happened during those late nights building installations or developing concepts alongside friends and collaborators. Those moments contain the purest version of why I love creative work. It’s the process, the people, the collective act of making something together.
If I could, what would I change about myself?
Very little, to be honest, though perhaps I would like to worry less. But I also know that every experience, including the painful ones, shaped who I became. The failures, grief, mistakes, and uncertainty expanded my capacity for empathy and understanding in ways comfort never could have.
I think we become healthier when we stop approaching ourselves as problems to be corrected. When growth is rooted in compassion, it tends to endure far longer than anything built from self-contempt.
What is my greatest achievement in work?
My greatest achievements are accumulations. It’s about the endurance to continue learning and adapting.
Creating one of the largest floral paper installations in the Southern Hemisphere at Menlyn Park Shopping Centre remains incredibly meaningful to me. We designed indigenous South African flora entirely from white paper, including proteas and jacaranda foliage. There was something philosophically satisfying about the tension between delicacy and creating scale. I am also deeply proud of creating an installation for a private event involving the House of Dlamini (the reigning royal family of the Kingdom of Eswatini). Projects like that taught me how immersive experiences function emotionally and culturally at the same time.
Where would I most like to live?
It’s less about coordinates and more about emotional infrastructure, so anywhere the people I love are laughing nearby, somewhere with plants and warm light.
What is my most treasured possession?
I am sentimental in the old-world sense of the word. I keep objects because they carry memory, but what I am really attached to are the people and moments behind those things. It is hard to reduce it to just one.
What is my most marked characteristic?
I have a slightly unreasonable level of curiosity about why things feel the way they feel. I struggle to experience anything in isolation. Everything connects to something else eventually, whether I want it to or not.
What is my most inspirational location, in my city?
Since I only recently relocated, I still feel like I am discovering the city in fragments. But in Tbilisi, probably the art department inside Rustaveli Theatre. The building itself is magnificent, all that theatrical grandeur and old-world architecture, but what I love most is the atmosphere inside the art department tucked behind everything polished and public-facing. Massive rooms, paint-stained wooden floors, round windows pouring in beautiful light, and finished and unfinished things everywhere.
I also have close friends working there, so the place became emotionally attached to a particular period of my life very quickly.
What is my favorite place to eat and drink, in my city?
Mafshalia in Tbilisi. Semi-underground, no performative hospitality, just genuinely good food. It feels like someone accidentally opened their family kitchen to the public. Mafshalia also had some of the best khachapuri there, which is a dangerous thing to say in Georgia because people take that subject very seriously.
What books influenced my life and how?
The Diary of Anaïs Nin taught me that interior life is legitimate material. Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle sharpened my understanding of how easily modern life turns human experience into performance. The book feels predictive now because sometimes contemporary culture feels less lived than endlessly displayed. Then, I loved Les Chants de Maldoror, which I encountered probably too young. It’s strange, excessive, surreal, unhinged. It reminded me that art does not always need to behave properly to reveal something truthful.
You Only Die Once. What music would I listen on my last day?
Sixto Rodriguez. His music feels emotionally honest in a very unadorned way, which I think is much harder to achieve than people realize. Definitely some Johnny Cash too. And somewhere late at night, probably The Girl from Ipanema as performed by Frank Sinatra, which feels like an appropriately elegant way to disappear for a few minutes.
Who is my hero or heroine in fiction?
Beatrix Kiddo, the Bride from Kill Bill. There is something inspiring about a woman who channels grief, rage, discipline, and survival into such terrifying clarity.
Who are my heroes and heroines in real life?
My parents. Most convictions are inherited long before they become articulated philosophies. I also appreciate architect Tadao Ando because he proved simplicity can still feel spiritual without collapsing into emptiness, and American visual artist Man Ray for treating creativity like an open system.
Which movie would I recommend to see once in a lifetime?
I would recommend City of God, adapted from the novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the actual Cidade de Deus housing project in Rio de Janeiro.
It’s not emotionally overly polished. There is something important about films that don’t simplify people into heroes or villains. Everyone in that film feels shaped by environment, survival, desperation, ego, innocence, and luck. Basically, human contradiction.
What role play stories in my life and work?
Beautiful visuals without emotional architecture collapse quickly because nothing underneath them is carrying weight. The same applies to people, honestly.
Narrative is how human beings metabolize experience. Across all the different countries I lived in, the visual language of beauty shifted constantly around me, but grief, hope, awe, longing, love, and alienation, those things remained recognizable everywhere. That changed the way I approach creativity, whether it is art direction or installation design.
The work is about making something feel inevitable.
What do the words ‘You are the storyteller of your own life’ mean to me?
Authorship carries a significant amount of responsibility because we all decide what meaning survives our experiences. The narratives we internalize determine what we permit, pursue, believe, and deserve.
Two people can survive the exact same event and walk away with entirely different understandings of who they became because of it. That has always fascinated me.
Who is my greatest fan, sponsor, partner in crime?
My son. He reminds me why integrity matters beyond career language and industry validation. People talk about legacy in abstract, ego-driven terms. Parenthood makes it tangible very quickly.
He is the biggest project I have ever had the privilege to be part of.
Which people or companies would I like to work with?
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain for immersive cultural storytelling.
Björk because she treats experimentation as emotional necessity rather than stylistic performance.
Es Devlin for the way she merges spatial design, performance, light, narrative, and emotional scale without losing conceptual clarity.
Pierre et Gilles because their work refuses restraint in the most magnificent way possible. Hyper-stylized, emotionally charged, theatrical, devotional, strange.
Robert Wilson for turning light, silence, slowness, and staging into something almost architectural.
What project am I looking forward to work on?
A large-scale immersive installation that merges spatial design, narrative writing, sound, film, sculpture, and tactile material systems into one cohesive emotional experience. Something physically monumental but emotionally intimate at the same time.
Ideally something slightly ambitious to the point where at least one person involved quietly says, “I genuinely do not know how we are going to pull this off,” which is usually when things start becoming interesting.
Where can you see me or my work?
Across editorial campaigns, immersive installations, paper art, fashion film, narrative systems, and cultural projects.
Also at www.lizlotz.com.
What do the words “Passion Never Retires” mean to me?
Passion, to me, is sustained attention, what remains when applause disappears.
I think real passion becomes quieter with time, but far more durable. Less ego, more devotion. It survives failure, exhaustion, self-doubt, changing industries, bad algorithms, financial instability, and all the other glamorous realities creative people rarely put on LinkedIn.
The people I admire most never really stop making things. They continue refining their eye, questioning themselves, learning, and experimenting. Passion never retires because curiosity does not.
Which creative heroines should Peter invite to tell their story?
Kathryn Harmer Fox: @kathrynharmerfox
Elene Tchanishvili: @elene_tchanishvili
Lyn Kennedy: @turquoise15
Suzaan Heyns: @suzaanh
How can you contact me?
Instagram: @liz.lotz
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