In Concert With Glass
About Lisa & Her Creative Practice
My creative practice is situated at the intersection of art, writing, language, and design, and I call it an intersectional practice. I often work like a conceptual artist, where the idea is of foremost concern, but the material results and details are important to me as well. I try to layer my work to make it accessible on different levels from varying perspectives. My design approach is similar as I aim to provoke thought or reflection in my user. I often ask, ‘what if?’ and question assumptions through my process and outputs, as exemplified by my approach to my research project as well as the form of this written thesis. I cross discipline boundaries and regularly work with mixed media. More recently, I have worked in collaboration with glass artists, computer engineers, sound designers, and composers to question the nature of glass. My creative process nearly always begins with words and their lyric interplay, coupled with quick flashes of associations and combinations in wordplay, images, sounds, memories, and experiences. Ultimately, I try to match my idea to the media that will best express it, however, I gravitate towards using glass as a primary medium, while also incorporating lyric text.
For me, glass is an endless source of conceptual exploration as it inherently has contradictory characteristics and a polarity that I find so interesting. It can be hot or cold, viscous or solid, reflective and glossy or matte and absorbing, sharp or smooth, transparent or opaque; it can break, shatter, cut, and do damage, or frame, preserve, and hold safe. In my practice, I look to the glass, its material properties, ubiquitous nature, and amorphous characteristics to suggest a project or to indicate how a project might unfold. I make connections to it through my associative lyric writing that draws on my experiences and memories, primarily through words but also through images and sounds. This word-working and associative writing leads me in my dialogue with the glass material, and aids me in realizing physical works. My practice outputs have included glass objects and sculptures, artist’s books with glass, glass and sound installations, and even films focused on glass. My recent combinations of glass, sound, and digital technology blur discipline lines, making it difficult to categorize or label them. Glass as a creative medium is currently crossing boundaries, moving from craft and design into artistic disciplines and other creative fields. My work is currently located in this yet-to-be-defined, interdisciplinary approach to glass, where there is space to employ my associative thinking and word-working. For additional portfolio images, please see Makers Marks, Sorrows, and my gallery, and for more details, please see my CV and exhibitions page.