Lisa Fowler
Long interested in science and art, Lisa graduated from Boston University with degrees in Biology and Fine Arts. One of her first grown-up jobs was illustrating birds for the New England Zoological Society, which led to being featured in a WGBH short documentary on working bird artists. She honed design skills with Art Director stints at magazines and nonprofits in the Boston area. Her fascination with design as a tool to support and extend engagement with content ultimately led to a long career in book publishing, culminating as Vice President and Publisher of Professional Books/Curricular Resources at Heinemann, in Portsmouth, NH.
Lisa's time for art-making was limited during the book years, of course, but the drive to create never abated. She decided to retire early from the publishing world in order to spend more hours in her basement workshop, making art and trying not to injure herself with power tools. Over the years her work has evolved: as an innate hunter-and-gatherer, she had grown particularly interested by the possibilities inherent in cobbling sculptures together from (mostly) found objects. In response, her work has shifted from meticulously realistic drawings and paintings to decidedly more nonrepresentational sculptures.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I want my art to look like it might have a place on the evolutionary tree, if that framework was reassembled with a sense of humor. I’m obsessed with creating analogs of organic forms from inorganic materials, looking for the creative tension between the final configuration and the wood, metal, paint and fiber used to create it. While I make no attempt to recreate actual animals — aside from the occasional preoccupation with horses — I want my facsimiles to be just familiar enough to evoke smiles.