Featured Artist Lisa McKimmie Biographical Statement

After spending almost 20 years in Asia and Europe, visual artist Lisa McKimmie is now living and working in Sydney, on unceded land traditionally owned by the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. 

McKimmie uses pigments, salvaged materials and metal-point to create paintings that are psychological landscapes of genuine abstraction, and they have been created slowly with a focus on mark making, and the object as lasting artefact in mind and place.

Her works incorporate humour and irony with a respect for the history of art. The slowly produced silver-point and pigment drawings are referred to, tongue firmly in cheek, as anti-viral both in the digital sense of viral internet sensations and because silver is a valuable metal in medicine and can be used to neutralize viruses. During COVID lockdown McKimmie was working in Holland, in a small studio thanks to the generosity of Dutch artist and printmaker Florence Fernhout and the Wassenaar Gemeente.

…While I originally began to use the studio (in the Hague) as a base and move about the forests and dunes to work, I ultimately worked in lockdown in the clearing by the Princessetuin Garden, painting the same view again and again. The shuttered windows wrapped around the studio allowed natural light and a safe way to communicate, occasionally, with passers-by as more and more people found their only way to get out of the house was a walk in nature. Being absorbed in the shifting green landscape was a panacea to the difficulties of negotiating the stress, sadness losses of 2020. Repetition of the same landscape over the seasons was absorbing and inspiring. The changes in depth and complexity, line and colour, daily or seasonal light, while ultimately impossible to catch in their complexity, became my project. It became a year-long meditation … Sometimes I would receive feedback from others using the forests. ‘I can see the influence of Dutch painters yet there is something in all of these that is not at all Dutch. Is that Australian?’

Her exhibition at Flinders Street Gallery in May 2023 highlighted her environmental concerns that few art materials do not have a negative environmental footprint, or create waste. In ‘sinking’ heavy metals, recycled precious materials and art, jewellery and roofing waste (including lead, silver, copper, gold, cadmium, cobalt and manganese) into an archival art object these works play on the ironies of creating lasting aesthetic, functional objects to collect and soothe the mind and soul while we exploit the same materials for many objects and functions in our daily lives that incorporate a built-in obsolescence.

Meditation on such questions, including the role of colour, movement and line in painting, influenced the further shift to abstraction in the works since 2021.

I hope people will enjoy looking at my work and living with or revisiting it. The idea of unique artwork as an object that is cared for and preserved in our culture is representative of the thought I think we need to bring to our relationship with all objects.

Lisa McKimmie can be found on-line at  https://myaz-b.com/.

Images courtesy Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney

 

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