La Juventud
Adolescent Liberty
Polarized VII (The Gloaming)
Lisa Marsh
Artist Statement
My studio practice uses drawing, painting and printmaking to explore ordinary human experience in the context of a conflicted and fragile world. Materiality and surface are central to the practice. Reaching beyond the fundamentals of composition and color, I embrace intuitive mark-making and the instinctive use of hand and brush to determine pictorial outcomes, together with the drips, incidentals and erasures that arise from the act of drawing with paint. Launching from a compositional idea and supporting imagery, I begin each canvas with the understanding that the finished work will arrive out of the process.
The Wall suite of paintings centers on the crisis of mass-migration. In an age where the prerogatives of marginalized groups are under extreme duress, I am interested in examining the experience of those caught in the crosshairs of national and global pressures. Although specific in portraying actual persons as captured by news media, the figures rendered in paint are universalized, conveying relatable human drama and exploring the co-existence of triumph and struggle in ordinary life.
The series Polarized depicts scenes painted in unrealistic palettes and evidencing mixed degree of finish within pictorial elements. Using found Polaroids from mid-century era as resource material, the paintings have one foot in a not-so-distance past and the other solidly squared up with the controversies that define today’s polarized society. The paintings belie tension and consider topics ranging from the relevance of guns to the status of girls/women, exploring an uncomfortable nostalgia that considers a privileged collective-consciousness unbothered by conditions of inequity, racism, violence, consumerism and a fragile planet.
While maintaining reference to the natural world, I hope to embue paintings with emotive qualities that invite speculation, inquiry and introspection. Figures are portrayed in unguarded real life and reside in settings that are at the same time familiar and alien. The work’s content examines conflict, struggle and loss on equal footing with steadfast, passionate survival, exploring relatable human emotion in a contemporary world immersed in struggle.