Lisa Rawlinson
|
Artist Bio
Austin-based artist Lisa Rawlinson received her BFA from the University of North Texas in 1995 with an emphasis in painting and drawing. She was a founding member of Good/Bad Art Collective in Denton, Texas and continued to be active with the group until 1998. After graduating, Lisa fell in love with making books and ultimately chose to pursue a career in publishing over fine arts. In 2016, she made a deliberate choice to focus her creativity on her own work and began making art again, showing her work for the first time after a twenty year break in 2017. She is currently taking time to make art almost exclusively. Artist Statement My work is growth-minded with an emphasis on both inner and outer exploration. I’m interested in digging in and understanding the external world using the act of making art as a means to spur learning, as well as investigating the human element and my personal connection to the world. The four paintings included in this exhibition were part of a project in which I made a small painting related to science daily for 100 days. As a natural progression of my career in educational publishing, I am aware of the various ways in which we process information and secure it into our understanding. Each painting resulted from research and reading I had been doing, isolating a small slice of broader study. Determining how to visualize a concept combined with the act of painting and later writing about the works helped me absorb their meaning more deeply. These paintings in particular sprang from investigation into the physics and astronomy of the universe, reflecting a general interest in the underlying reality of our world and ourselves. I chose these four in contrast to the exhibit title “Chaos” because they allude to the ultimate macro-level structure of everything, a sort of anti-chaos. Composition of the Universe pulls from my experience designing data and information. A pie-chart turned square, it reflects the known percentages of dark energy (~72%), dark matter (~24%), and everything else including hydrogen and helium gas, neutrinos, and all visible matter (~4%). BOSS Great Wall is a visualization of the largest structure we have observed to date, a complex of galaxy superclusters that was identified in 2016. Scale Comparison of the Sun, Giant Star, and Supergiant and Scale Comparison of the Earth and Sun are more straight-forward depictions intended to suggest the vastness of the physical universe in terms closer to home. Together, these four paintings offer perspective and are an invitation to consider our personal position in this hierarchical structure. And while these particular works explore scale outward, the larger project also explored that idea in the other direction as well, scaling down to a particle level. While some may find this immensity discomforting, I find it reinforces a sense of the preciousness of life and the connections between all things while giving pause about all of our collective disagreements and struggles. CV EDUCATION University of North Texas, Bachelor of Fine Arts 1995 RECENT EXHIBITIONS 5th Annual Juried Exhibition Artspace111 at Artspace111, Fort Worth, TX Juried by Christina Rees, Editori-in-Chief of Glasstire June 22–July 28, 2018 10th Annual Little Artist Big Artist Show at Mondo Gallery, Austin, TX April 27–April 29, 2018 5th Annual Artist Trading Card Show at Art.Science.Gallery., Austin, TX Winner in Geoplanetary Category August 12–October 1, 2017 Due E.A.S.T. Group Show, Big Medium Pop-Up Gallery, Austin, TX November 9–November 19, 2017 East Austin Studio Tour, Juried Open Studio Show November 11–12 & 18–19, 2017 “The Birds” Group Show at Art.Science.Gallery., Austin, TX August 12–October 1, 2017 INTERVIEW Who Are These People? Podcast November 2017 https://www.whoarethesepeople.net/lisa-rawlinson-ep-10/ |
|
