Lisa Congdon and her hand-​crafted warmness

During one of the exped­i­tions to the wide open spaces of the inter­net, a col­lage was spot­ted. My eyes were scep­tic, in a way bored to be intrigued by all kinds of high-​standard con­cep­tu­al­ism. So, I star­ted to look for pure and simple, but attract­ive sim­pli­city. And then I found Lisa Congdom. Her col­lage was unpre­ten­tiously noticed and became a rest­ing place dur­ing my journey.

From frag­ments and specks of dust, I got to know some things about the author. Lisa Congdon lives in San Francisco, USA; she used to be a teacher, but now works in a stu­dio together with other artists. The author became inter­ested in art by chance in her thirties, although she hadn‘t drawn any­thing pre­vi­ously. But sud­den enlight­en­ment some­times occur, right? Precisely, due to the lat­ter phe­nomenon, Lisa is not a pro­fes­sional artist, but she is guided by her intu­ition of com­pos­i­tion, col­our or any­thing other. She paints, moulds col­lages or draws with ink. Lack of edu­ca­tion in the field of art did not become an obstacle for nine per­sonal and some group exhib­i­tions that had already taken place.

Interestingly, Lisa is an act­ive col­lector. She pos­sesses around thirty vari­ous col­lec­tions: orange-​coloured ceram­ics, old mini­ature pho­to­graphs, stamps and small pic­tures, old Scandinavian/​Japanese/​French dishes and kit­chen utensils. And so on. In addi­tion to all of this – pets, among which there is at least one cat, appear­ing as an attrib­ute of cosi­ness. Colourful patch­works, pil­lows seamed together from them, pat­terns and walls, with any stuff that finds a niche on them hanged all over.

After tak­ing a look at art, tangled with hand­work, you find almost the same stuff, which might be accom­mod­ated by a house wife, whose sub con­scious­ness is filled with nos­tal­gia. A view rep­res­ents a feel­ing, which could be caused by a warm get-​together with a piece of apple pie. The recipe ignores the stream of time and she also adds some oddness to it. Especially in three dimen­sional boxes-​collages or ordin­ary col­lages, where faces from pho­to­graph­ic­ally noisy, black and white old pic­tures lie per­due, and so do old labels of the same kind, even clip­pings from encyc­lo­pae­dias with schemes of humans‘ internal organs, cloths, stuffed birds, pieces of wood and everything that car­ries some sort of nos­tal­gic­ally sym­bol­ical mean­ing. On a cer­tain level. Of course, motives of nature should not be left out. I was amazed by her draw­ings on vin­tage books‘ sheets. Lovely.

More art­works here.

About author:

Aleksandr Pasevin
Aleksandr Pasevin is Art Pit’s strategist and designer, responsible for organization’s creative solutions. Aleksandr is also actively interested in new technologies, their connection with creativity and usage in cultural organizations. Aleksandr dislikes long discussions and considerations, and he mostly expresses his opinion quickly about whet... Read further >