STATEMENT

Lisa Hardegree
The Borning Room
Artist Statement

For this body of work I drew inspiration from the decorative arts of the Victorian period. The immense strides made during this time in exploration, innovation, and decoration were weighted by the fact that they were accomplished during a period of intense loss of life. I believe the excessively ornate qualities of the art of this period were a symptomatic reaction to reality, creating rituals and objects to fill up the world again when life was continually being emptied out. Through my own work I am interested in exploring the act of filling my world up again with art and acts that can embrace the finality of loss while celebrating the beauty of remembrance. I sought to create a new type of memorial that was not dedicated to the individual but rather the collective experience.
By utilizing the butterfly, a long accepted symbol of renewal and transition, I have created a space somewhere between a collector’s room or funeral home parlor. For a year I collected obituaries and simultaneously photographed and studied butterfly displays in natural history museums. With the realization that I regarded these displays of the deceased in the same way, awed by their beauty yet saddened by the knowledge that they were gone. This motivated me to create my own version of a memorial where I digitally combined the portraits from the obituaries with photographs of the butterflies. The compositions are frozen in time; somewhere between coming together and falling apart. I have used digital processes for the work in this show due to their inherent ability to straddle the two worlds of printmaking and photography allowing me to utilize the detail, delicacy, and authenticity of photography while maintaining the manipulation of printmaking. The cutting of the images away from the page and excising them from their negative space allowed them to exist within a liminal space between three dimensionality and flatness playing on the delicate appearance of paper that belies its physical strength when suspended in water or pinned to board possessing a similar weight and feel to a butterfly’s wing. Through my time spent creating this work I have embraced the importance of regarding things that are not meant to last forever and acknowledging the existence of those who may not have had a direct impact on my life but whose presence and subsequent absence shape and affect my world.