Lisa Walcott

Author: Lisa Walcott

  • Milk Drips and Cotton Balls

    (research)

  • Animated Gif!

    Obviously I really like loops/repetition. The animated gif has grabbed my attention. Perhaps there will be a piece or at least a website element that includes one. I ran across this while google image browsing for a piece I want to make: Great, huh?

  • Olifur's Fan

    I saw this piece installed at Chicago’s MCA over the summer. The piece hits on quite a few things that I really like in art work. The essence of the material informs the content of the piece. Air is used in a powerful and interesting way. There is also a nice balance of simplicity, delicacy…

  • My "To Read" List

    I have been trying to compile a list of ideas, subjects, artists…etc. to look at as I try to focus my thoughts toward a thesis project. As always I’m interested in a very wide array and resist categorizing as I find that boring. Defined = Boring (to me) Anyway, here is what I have come…

  • Sisyphus

    In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down. The endless labor of my art work that repeats in a small loop (Bless You, Pull Strings) relates to the Greek myth. I like to think about the work…

  • Double Dutch

    This is a mock up for a piece that I have been trying to realize for months. For now the jump ropes are attached to the wall and the mechanism is being turned by a hand held drill. There are a few aesthetic things to figure out here, but I am pretty sure I will…

  • pink and pretty?

    This piece has transformed itself many times since it’s conception. It was going to be excerpts from “carefree” songs (such as those by Jack Johnson) with a torso-esque figure attached to the wall doing a shoulder dance. For awhile it was going to be powered by a tape player motor. I tried making an armature…

  • Tickle Torture

    That is not the official title of this work, I just needed to call it something so this is the working title. This piece which is 4x12x2.5″ consists of pepper, a feather, a wooden encasement with a motor inside. I was thinking about sensations when I made this piece. Tickling, sneezing, flitting…

  • Ludic

    : playful in an aimless way

  • Ceal Floyer

    A new inspiration/favorite artist. Ceal Floyer’s witty & poignant work hits on something I constantly am striving for. Her work is dryly poetic in the way of a John Updike short story, but lingers like a drip on the edge of a spout. (Yeah, I just made that up! Ha!) Anyway, her work is interesting.…

  • Gestural Objects

    (Artist Statement in progress…as always) “Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace.” -Steven Millhauser Smallness lends itself to being sweet and modest. It is not clouded by grandeur or overarching themes. It is simply what it is, but by being so poignant it is able to…

  • automatism

    I had a great converstation in my studio yesterday with our Critic in Residence, Lane Relyea. He was really good at deducing and understanding my work as a whole (not sculpture vs. drawing vs. photography). He pointed out surrealist tendencies that I have. Almost everything is based on real experience, but it is shifted in…

  • Monstrous Stories

    I like the way Annette Messager relates to memory of childhood. The desires and fears of children are so untainted that they seem like they would give us clues into the nature of things–of us. I saw a Messager on my trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and really liked it in person more…

  • Simultaneous Peripheral Observation

    In the space between tactility and language the beautiful and unassuming linger. They exist in the peripheral, weaving in and out of clarity, difficult to get a clear handle on, resistant to words. There is room for the mind to guess and imagine. With a skepticism in the ability of language to contain our bodily…

  • Plugged

    I woke up one morning last week and thought “I need to put ear plugs into holes in the wall”. This rarely happens to me when I am making things. Ideas usually develop over long periods of time with extended trains of thought. It’s a very small, florescent orange piece. Kind of big and small…

  • Images from the Kitchen Table Series

    A series about the way things work. The things that go out and come in, pile up, get dirty and are cleaned. About home made at home.

  • couch

    (what’s in there?)

  • Picture 1…

    There are many ways that I document my thought processes. I have my physical sketchbook, this work journal, sound recording on my phone (mostly while driving), snapshots and screenshots. There is an ongoing digital folder of anything and everything that might trigger an idea from the web. Here is the collection of February 2009-present…

  • The Kitchen Table Drawings

    It took me quite awhile to realize that my work has a trend of domesticity that runs through it. It’s hard to find overarching themes, so I am glad to have identified one. At the moment I don’t have any photo’s of the actual drawings I have been making at the kitchen table, but Rob…

  • Panes

    As I acclimate to our new living quarters, I impulsively took some pictures of the morning light shining through the windows. As I was uploading them, I noticed a theme. I have done this often in the places where I live as the below history of images shows. The translucent but impenetrable properties of the…

  • Back at it.

    I’m back in Detroit, Cranbrook has started up. I’m moved into my new living quarters and my new studio. There’s as much possibility as the a blank page. Thick.

  • The Decisive Moment

    “Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment…

  • loofah

  • decedent meals shared, perhaps, between ballerinas

    I’m liking the photography of Laura Letinsky today. One article from New York Magazine described her images as “…elegant undone tables, always suggesting decadent meals shared, perhaps, between ballerinas.” It can be difficult to identify what it is about an image that you really like. You try to dive in based on color and composition…etc,…

  • hinged

    Connects while allowing distance. Dependent. Moves. My knee is a hinge. Door, cupboard. All of the opening and closing is because of the hinge.

  • Out of focus

    This summer has been a complete blur so far! Rob and I have been living out of our photography studio as we finish our basement apartment. We have been working very hard doing what we love to do: working with people and taking pictures. No complaints there…except that once again, art making has taken a…

  • Material Afterlife: UICA

    Last Friday, the Material Afterlife exhibition opened at the UICA in Grand Rapids in which my piece, Styrofoam #6 was included. I created and critiqued this piece last semester as 7 small hanging sculptures composed of deconstructed styrofoam beads which I stitched together with black thread. For this exhibition, I combine the seven smaller sculptures…

  • Ghosts

    I’ve written about the subject of the slightly obscured quite a bit under the title of intangibility or “in between”. It’s just such a beautiful small notion for me to imagine the things that are completely transitional and unable to be contained. On one hand it seems inconsequential, but applied to a larger view of…

  • Light Weight

    This is a new piece made from cut paper, strings and a motor.

  • About my work formally, stylistically and linguistically

    Intangibility Weaving in and out of clarity. Existent, but difficult to get a clear handle on. Fog does this, memory does this, veils do this. It’s more beautiful to leave room for the mind to guess and imagine than to be completely clear. There is a peak where ambiguity and clarity mingle perfectly. Perception What…