Biography
Lisa Co is an artist, printmaker and bookmaker from the South East coast of the United States. Originally from Georgia, she currently resides in Florida and works as Assistant Professor of Art at Florida Gateway College. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Armstrong State University and her Master's in Studio Art from Florida State University.
Artist Statement
Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes printmaking, bookmaking, video and writing, my is concerned with the interpretation and importance of parts. I make work that can only be experienced in pieces, that repeats itself and feels simultaneously like moving forward and waiting. Poetry corresponds to thought that is enamored with the unknown and is especially receptive to the act of becoming. Contemporary poetry introduces freedom of form into the very body of text - the abstraction of words and text bodies is related to the abstraction of the human body and therefore, identity. I feel strongly that the experience of my identity as an “in-between” person is closely related to insufficiency of language as a whole. As a First generation American and multiracial person, my identity and sense of place have never felt stable. Like the manipulation of a body of text, I often find myself tearing apart identity and trying to reinterpret it. The content of my work draws comparison between the physical foundations of the body (blood/bones), physical foundations of the world (brick/concrete), and the foundations of language (letters/syntax). I break apart syntax of found and original poetry by morphing the words using a Xerox scanner to literally pull apart the image of the poem or using traditional relief and monoprint practices to split the sentences into separate books. Through the comparisons forged between each of these foundations of identity, this process sometimes feels violent, but also alludes to the ability of a fractured base to break apart existing foundations and create new, mutable understandings - an act of becoming.
