BIO:
Lisa Walcott is a Midwest-based artist. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010 and has since created and exhibited her work nationally including Land of Tomorrow in Louisville, KY, Sadie Halie Projects in Minneapolis, MN and The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI. She has attended residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE and Three Walls. Walcott teaches sculpture classes at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her work grapples with and makes light of the perils of daily life using kinetic sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography.
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STATEMENT:
Specifically feeble and precisely precarious, my work translates elements of daily life. Moods, guilt, sensations, monotony, accumulation, and change are given bodies in objects and represented in gestures. Spaces of the mind are realized in physical form and daydreams animated in real space. Up close and in combination, these pieces begin to represent the fluidity and contradictions of the everyday.
The task of locating and giving form to shapeless sensations like presence, agitation or what it feels like to be full after eating will eventually fail because these feelings can never quite be manifested. However, there is often something more desirable in the always-absent compared to the attainable. The attempt to find shape and materiality for these abstract ideas involves collecting, combining, squinting, and meandering forward.
Inspiration is often derived from domestic spaces—a space that can be hauntingly dull as well as safe and protective. I look for comparisons, rely on the uncanny, and pull from daydreams to create sculptures that are relatable, but different. Many of the structures and productive objects are stressed or bent, but in their new forms, they can accomplish new feats. In these works, there is depth, connection, dependence, and elation. The absurd hints toward the profound while acknowledging struggle.