About Lisa
Bio
Lisa Walter (BFA) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Lisa’s sculpture, Insulting words in the singing of birds, was exhibited in Not Born Yesterday, Not Going Away at Harbourfront Centre’s 2022 CoMotion Festival. In 2017, she was an artist-in-residence of the Muscle Memory International Ceramic Symposium at the International Ceramic Studio in Hungary, which culminated in the exhibition, The Body Has Reasons Which Reason Knows Not Of, at Craft Ontario in 2019.
She exhibited regularly with Workman Arts, including two solo shows. Her artwork has appeared at Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Urban Gallery, and the Rendezvous With Madness film festival. Lisa designed the signature collection of the Mad Couture Catwalk, featured at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Fashion Art Toronto, and Rideau Hall, and her work was featured by Crow’s Theatre alongside their production of Psychosis 4.48. In the Globe and Mail, RM Vaughan described her work "delicate and unsparing." She lives in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg) in Canada, and is a graduate of MAWA’s 2021-22 Foundation Mentorship Program.
artist statement
I’ve always sensed that I have a language hidden inside myself. My parents, a designer and a visual artist, chose not to enroll me in art classes when I was a child, but encouraged my creativity and showed me how to see my world with an artist’s eye. I shape my vocabulary to give voice to my sense of disquiet and awe.
My work gives form to experiences of othering and being othered in relationships with one’s self, with other people, and with the land. It is an enquiry into the nature of belonging and exclusion, particularly in the context of madness and the ways in which certain people are constructed as crazy. I align myself as an artist and situate my work in the domain of Mad art.
Photo by Joan Walter