These are mugs made for a friend. I’m not sure if making mugs demotes my practice. There is a weird crossover between art and craft and fine art and design that I don’t understand. Quality of make is really important to me, does that make me a craftsperson? The work is both conceptual and practical, based on a quote from Blake and painted by the elements. Where am I?
My work revolves around turning the intangible into something substantial and functional. Substantial and functional is currently in clay (I like the link back to beginning of man with Prometheus forming us from clay and giving us the ability to create.) Heidegger wrote about a broken hammer allowing us access to it’s thinginess. Plato’s cave puts humans in a space of shadows, where the real things are too bright for us to comprehend. Object Oriented Ontology has thoughts, memories, moments in time and things act individually and under tension and string theory references multiple unseen dimensions. This intangible element is something that I’m fascinated with and my work attempts to bridge the gap between our reality and that which we cannot normally sense. I’m bridging the gap by using ancient methods of making and drawing combined with new technology to capture sound as movement, movement as pattern and pattern as form. I’m interested in analogue generative art. Data driven from nature, songs and poems turned into solid forms that can be held in the hand to give a different experience and perspective of the original source. Experiments to date include using sound, poetry and nature as sources of data to use to make analogue generative art. Inspirations tend to include an oblique reference to hell (Dante’s Inferno, Blake. Milton) and contemporary philosophy, in particular Object Oriented Ontology. I’m fascinated by Mobius strips and the hyperbolic plane. I’m interested in interdisciplinary collaboration (philosophy, literature, science, maths) and working with senses of sound, touch and sight. Taste and smell might come later. More info at www.lisa-cole.co.uk
