Artist-Lisa Bruce

LISA BRICE
by Sue Williamson (October, 2007)

The first artbio on Lisa Brice appeared online in January 1999. In a new programme, ArtThrob will produce updated artbios on artists as the occasion arises.

MODUS OPERANDI

Directly engaging with sensitive subjects, Lisa Brice has used her extraordinary draughtsmanship skills and a wide variety of media to make a series of highly charged works which have established her as a leading figure of her generation.

Eight years ago, Brice was known for her constructed artworks combining found objects, or domestic materials such as linoleum, with steel to make wall artworks, installations and sculptural pieces. These iconic works explored the uncomfortable subject, in a newly democratic South Africa, of suburban fear as a rising crime rate impinged on domestic security. Jet Master Couple 1997, part of a larger, gallery-sized installation of padded panels called Staying Alive, was a good example of this period, in which banal images of suburbanites frolic unaware of the hooded figures in the background.

In recent years, Brice, who now works between London, Trinidad and Cape Town, has returned to painting and its linked discipline of drawing, a move which together with an increasing assurance in the work, has proved a critical success. 'Night Vision', her first painting solo show at the Goodman Johannesburg in 2006, used a reduced palette of greyed-out greens and blues to focus on the uncertainties of childhood, and was a sellout.

Taking on the theme of the awkward urgencies of adolescent lust and love, Brice's new work negotiates with authority the difficult terrain between spontaneous drawing and fully realised figure painting.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

'My move from painting to constructed work after art school came about through my frustrations with what I felt were limitations of the medium. With a return to painting in the last few years I have became aware of the infinite possibilities within its constraints and feel challenged to work within these limitations.

'I am beginning to push the boundaries of the traditional within the medium, using the surface, like denim, as having "meaning"... suggesting something other than merely a surface to hold paint - in the same way as I began to paint on linoleum, mirrors, curtaining at Michaelis (art school).

'I cull images from a variety of media sources, photography and film as well as using personal photos. I am attracted to the idea of repetition, chasing that high, stories told and retold. A drug high once experienced is sought out again and again, and the same urge can be applied to a state of emotional high.

'In painting, I crave the rush of getting something right, of the work coming together. There are an infinite number of ways this may be achieved with the same image (but not within the same painting). I want to try them all. There is a parallel to the repeated actions of chasing an emotional high through drugs, or love.

'I struggle at times with the romanticism of painting and with the subject of love at a time of so much war and tragedy - but of course how can one not... it is ammunition and an armour in dark times.

'Whilst Roland Barthes suggests "photography has been, and still is tormented by the ghost of painting", for me, I feel it moves in the opposite direction - my painting process is "tormented" in a sense by photography. It is a real push and pull with the photographic source material as starting point - the most successful works in my opinion are those in which a real departure is made and something else happens - a kind of alchemy I guess.'