Lisa Temple-Cox

Address:			Cuckoo Farm Studios
Telephone:			07980 357418
Email:			lisatemplecox@gmail.com
Website:			www.lisatemple-cox.co.uk
			Multi-Media · Assemblage

Description:

 

My studio practice has developed within and investigates the mediums of collage, assemblage, installation and sculpture.

 

Commissions Taken • Work For Sale • Tuition Given

 

Open Studio Dates Available:

17/18/24/25 Sept am/pm

01/02 Oct am/pm

also by appointment

 

Find this studio:on the Open Studios Map

 

 

Further Infomation

 

My studio practice has developed within and investigates the mediums of collage, assemblage, installation and sculpture. Its primary focus is the philosophical category of the self: I have used methods and approaches of ethnography as part of a practice that explores my own identity as an artist.

My interests philosophically lie in exploring the realms of identity, personal history, and conscious–or unconscious–ness through the intersections of art and science. There is a deep-rooted fascination for and interest in human remains, and it seems that the mixture of fascination and repulsion is universal irrespective of gender, race or culture. I have been making experimental work inspired by methods of preserving the human body documented in the medical museum, framed by the aesthetics and discourse of the vanitas.

What has emerged from my academic and practical research is an understanding of how we interact with specimen display within the contexts of the art exhibition and medical museum, and its relationship to questions of self and subjectivity. I am currently exploring the interstices of art and science, and plan to undertake residencies in medical museums, developing a deeper understanding of my self and my practice in the process. I know that the experience of being in an unusual situation – outside of the comfort zone of my studio space – changes and influences the work I make: additionally, working in a museum in another country – one where my knowledge of the language is hesitant or unconfident – has a discernable effect upon the perception and focus of my working processes.

 

Previous work has addressed issues concerning a sense of displacement and search for identity that resulted in an ongoing body of work entitled ‘languages I don’t speak.’ This is one of the reasons I am particularly interested in working abroad. I am also looking at ways of introducing text into my work: perhaps through use of the photo transfer techniques that I have been employing during my experiments with the ethnographic postcard, which also subvert the permanence of photographic imagery by interventions which reveal the effects of time and the impermanence of memory.

 

I have yet to fully explore the notion of the whole head as a vanitas: to this end I intend to cast my head in a number of materials that reference notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as having a material symbolism. I intend to record the interaction of the solid matter of the head as it decays, grows, or otherwise changes within the liquid medium, referencing the notion of vanitas and subverting the purposes of the medical wet collection, which is to fix and preserve the physical matter, in the same way that photographs fix and preserve a moment in temporal experience.