Lisa Hart

“We live surrounded by ideas and objects infinitely more ancient than we imagine: and yet at the same time everything is in motion.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I am interested in the experiences in life which are common to all people no matter when or where in history they live, from ancient times to present day. These shared human experiences - sensations of the senses, memories, longing, desire, joy, the cycles and rhythms of life, etc. - as well as our means of recording them, are the genesis of my current assemblages. This work incorporates natural found objects juxtaposed with modern language, photography and drawing. The language in the work is used both for content and as visual texture. I have an ongoing interest in written language and how thoughts are translated into symbols/words. I am fascinated by a child’s mastery of a written language, of mark-making that relates to a system and can be passed to another person and deciphered only by one who knows the code.

The work is also about collecting, the urge of the human species to find, sort, display and catalogue. Each in our own unique way, we are collectors of objects, ideas, experiences, memories, reactions, attachments. We define ourselves through our collections and by story telling, oral, written and visual - the passing on of ideas and memories. Reality is held in memory - altered by imagination and time, creating an elusive remembered past.