Meet Lisa Wright

Lisa’s work often features suspended, isolated figures within liminal spaces that are not connected to any time period. The backgrounds of her paintings are simple coloured or black spaces, rendering the figures distance from the viewer, their size and their worlds up for interpretation. This often creates a strange relationship between viewer and the subject in that the subject looks as though it could disappear at any point or reach out to them.

The Guilty Gaze on the Innocent

Lisa is fascinated by the childhood desire to grow up and often weaves this theme through her work. ‘There’s a pathos to Lisa Wright’s extensive new body of work. Her paintings are home to youthful figures who stand out of context and nearly always alone. Sometimes they threaten to disappear into the background altogether. Either way, they stare out at you defiantly or bitterly or resignedly’, Lizzie Loyd writes. The characters attain elements of purity in their dainty and elegant 18th Century outfits. Bows, lace and toys are often represented within these liminal spaces, representative of that strange and isolating time in one’s life when we are neither a child nor an adult. In that way, the voids in which these figures float suck the figures in to create a sense of them being lost. Lisa’s work is therefore deeply informed by psychological themes.

It is sometimes the case that with such deeply thematic work, that the work might be more conceptual. However this is not the case for Lisa, her works are the outcome of a long painterly process where she considers colour, composition and depth in such ways that tie a bow around her psychological narratives. As Bruce Russell writes, ‘The great skill of Wright is to describe this rite of passage of common memory in figurative paintings whose vigorous painterliness and plangent colouristic harmonies, anchored in fluent, secure draughtsmanship, evoke historical as well as more recent models’ (Bruce Russell and Beardsmore Gallery, 2010).

We are so delighted to have Lisa on board with the trust, and are so excited to see how she approaches our Art on a Ukulele project so please join us to find out more by having a look at our Phundee page and getting involved, and signing up to our mailing list (at the bottom of the page) to receive updates about this project and to find out about our crowdfunding campaign, the rewards we are offering and be part of the process over the next few weeks.

Fete Galant

About the writer

Rosa Torr has a BA in Politics and Philosophy from London currently at University College Dublin. Her place of interest is political theory and in particular Gender Studies. Rosa has written for numerous online publications and the University Observer. She is also a theatre maker and is currently co-artistic director of BUMP&GRIND Theatre Company. The show she co-wrote BUMP will be on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.