Lisa Traxler

Artist statement

Traxler responds to the weight of remembered experience, creating an environmental autobiography – a sense of self and place, intimately connected. Through this form of memory-mapping, Traxler has been able to extend her practice in new directions, from life-sized enamel and steel sculptures, to suspended ephemeral stitched paper sculptures.

She challenges the concept of self within a space, dissecting the idea through rich colour punctuated by geometric forms and portals through paint and the sculptural form. Her vibrant abstract paintings of acrylic and graphite on canvas paved the way for most recent works of vitreous enamel on steel. There is a tension between the nature of the materials used and their transformation into sculpture – paintings in space.

‘Her most recent body of work consists of large-scale steel and vitreous enamel sculptures. These begin as delicate paper maquettes that are constructions of small clusters of individual sheets that are deftly cut and torn, coloured with paint and delineated with graphite. There is a lightness and poise to these objects that suggest they capture a fleeting, transitory moment of vision. The revelatory nature of her compositions in space embodies Traxler’s journey from the canvas to the factory and echoes the journey that she has embarked upon in her own life. She lives in an environment where anything seen in her surroundings can trigger an imagistic, compositional or painterly response.

 ‘She makes stitched collages that intermix found images or archive material with drawing and painting, using the lyrical active-reflective-reactive compositional method. A major series of Memory Vessels and Dreamscapes have been produced. These are made from paper (or paper objects) and red thread and they solve the composition in a subtly different way from the paintings and steel and enamel sculptures. Found imagery is collated, collaged and reprographically manipulated. It is also, sometimes, deformed into a three-dimensional shape. The manipulated imagery on these paper constructions form the basis for ‘line drawings’ made from stitched rows that follow their contours. Often the red thread is seen from the reverse side, or makes a linear foray out into the space in which the works are installed, anchoring them to a site-specific location.

For Traxler, an art piece is the experienced, felt and intuited world – a connection with her own immediate surroundings and way of life.’

(Jonathan Parsons – ‘Space Lived’)