Conversation with Lisa Barthelson

Please enjoy my conversation with Lisa Barthelson. Originally a painter, Lisa currently explores and works in many media: printmaking, ceramics, photography, encaustic, site specific environmental installations/sculpture, mixed media, and found object assemblage.  She looks at everything as a potential art medium: a material to be used and transformed. From traditional art making materials: paint, pencil, printmaking ink, paper, wax and clay, to the debris we generate in the course of our daily lives and then throw out, it all excites Lisa.  

https://www.lisabarthelson.com/home 

https://www.lisabarthelson.com/large-multi-view/family-debris-series-sculpture--mixed-media/4011220-2-40142/family-debris-series-sculpture--mixed-media.html 

https://theumbrellaarts.org/ 

This podcast was created by Natalya Khorover. It was produced and recorded by Natalya, as well as researched and edited by her. SALVAGE is a product of ECOLOOP.ART.

If you enjoy this show, please rate and review us wherever you’re listening—and be sure to come back for another conversation with a repurposed media artist.

Music theme by RC Guida

Visit Natalya’s website at www.artbynatalya.com

Visit Natalya’s community at www.repurposercollective.com

Visit Natalya’s workshops at https://www.ecoloop.art/

Transcript

Welcome to Salvage, a podcast for conversations with artists about the repurposed materials they use in their art practice. Hello. Coming up is my conversation with artist Lisa Barthelsen. Originally a painter, Lisa currently explores and works in many media printmaking, ceramics, photography, and caustic site specific environmental installations and sculpture. Mixed media and found object as assemblage. She looks at everything as a potential art medium, a material to be used and transformed from traditional art making materials paint, pencil, printmaking, ink, paper, wax and clay to the debris we generate in the course of our daily lives and then throw it out.

It all excites Lisa, a thank you so much for agreeing to be on my podcast. I was so jazzed a few months ago when you agreed to speak to the Repurposer collective. That was just. I'm ever so grateful for that. That's such a fun discussion, and everybody really enjoyed your presentation. And even people who listen to it afterwards or watched it afterwards, have mentioned how much they enjoyed it.

So thank you. It was a great experience for me. Thank you. Well thank you for agreeing to do part two. I guess.

I'm honored because I have watched the some of these episodes and some of my favorite artists have been interviewed, so I am honored. Thank you. Oh, great. Great. Okay. Now I want to know who were your favorite artists. One of them is Michelle Lougee, who I know personally. And. And everything else is going to slip out of my head.

So I think maybe Rebecca. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So they're both close to you, right? Right. And they're friends of mine. So I particularly enjoyed watching them and some other ones. And now I won't remember their names, but those people that I personally know. It's stuck in my mind. Oh, good. I'm sure they'll enjoy your your interview as well, I hope.

Thank you. So I'm going to start at the very beginning. Were you an artist as a kid? Yes. My parents were artists. Oh, okay. My sisters were artists. So I grew up in a family of artists. My parents met in art school at Syracuse University. Oh, so my father was a commercial artist and art director. My mother worked at many jobs when we were growing up.

None of them art related and really, started to make art with a lot of figure. Later in life, again, when she moved to Connecticut after my parents divorced and looked forward to making a lot of art after she retired. But unfortunately, at some point she, had dementia. So that was lost. So I, I often feel that I'm realizing her dreams in many ways and I feel her with me.

So. And she was a wonderful, very talented. So. Oh. That's wonderful. Oh. So what kind of art did you make when you were a kid? Well, because my father was a commercial artist, we had the best art materials of anybody around. So when we had a project, our goal was to keep my father's hands off it. Because I do remember some of the early projects, particularly from my older sister.

He did a Roman road. He did like a Navajo Hogan that were like, you know, commercial grade. So, so we used whatever we had at hand, a lot of drawing, a lot of card making. My father also made personal cards for our family, so we always made cards for each other. It's, an art for each other.

I can remember doing sketches of my my sisters. Not necessarily complimentary. But I and I think all three of us. I have two sisters. We all grew up, sort of viewed as the Basel and girls artists, you know, which I'll admit, when I, when I was in high school, I found to be a little bit of a burden and annoying because I was a teenager, you know.

Right. Of course. But I do remember, like, you know, all through elementary school and high school, that's how we were considered, you know, artists. So the Dewhurst. Well, and I may I did my first painting at 5 or 6 on the picnic table. It was on a canvas board with oil paint and turf. So I sort of laugh at this now because I have three kids, and I don't think I'd be sending them out to the picnic table with oil paint and.

So I have two of those paintings, you know, my little scratchy writing. Jesus. Oh, wonderful that you have them. I do have, but, you know, so I don't think there were any boundaries. And I look back as, you know, as we all know, a lot of those art materials were toxic. And one of our favorite things was to put rubber cement on our hands and roll the bottles, which you would never do that now, but that's what we did, you know?

But that just you saying that sentence vividly brings up the smell of rubber cement. I could feel it right now. It was the greatest stuff. Yeah. So, you know, in Duco Cement, all of this stuff was really toxic. But that's how we grew up. That's awesome. And did you go to school for art as well afterwards? Well, that's its own story.

I did go to school for art, and I applied as a as an art major, and I got well, it's a long story. I had an accident in California where I was living to become a resident so that I could go to school for free, because my parents really didn't have the funds for college. I had an accident.

I came back and I ended up going to University of Connecticut, and I started as a fine arts major. But the way I was getting through college was to waitress, bartend and to have work study and small loans. So being the weirdly responsive kid I was then, I was concerned about getting out of college and not having a way to pay off those loans.

I had no illusions because I seen my parents struggle. And I decided that I would find something that was heart related. That was a profession. And so I would get a job as a professional when I got out. So I changed my major to environmental design with a focus on landscape architecture. Oh, wow. So I graduated with a B.S., Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design, and when I got out, it was a recession and I could not find it.

So I went back to Barton. Best laid plans. And then I went to graduate school to get my MLA, masters of Landscape Architecture at UMass Amherst, again working in a restroom, a restaurant with small loans. And I got out. There was a recession and I couldn't find a job again. And. Oh, good enough to get your professional registration.

You had to work for a registered landscape architect for a certain number of years. And then you were, you could take the professional registration exam, which was two days, like 6 or 8 hours a day. Oh, wow. And so eventually I begged someone to hire me, and I told them, you know, you can test me out for a month.

You know, if you want to fire me after that, that's fine. You know, all this stuff. And in the meantime, my husband was in law school, so we really did not have any. Oh my goodness. And eventually, I stayed for a year, and then I just kept working at different places. Like many professions, when you leave you up yourself.

Yeah. Salary and your responsibility. So I moved around a bit, and I did that for probably over ten years. And while I was doing that, I made art, you know, because art was integrated into my life. Right? Nothing fabulous. But, you may find that you're making painting mostly painting. Because it was something I could do at my drafting table.

And there is a lot of drawing and layout in landscape architecture, right? A lot of the sketching, you know, it's all what I considered art, art and design, functional art, form and function. But for me, I would do things like painting, you know, you may you probably find this. I think most artists feel like they need to make art to sort of stay sane and grounded and happy.

So I had to do that. Yeah. I'm glad you had that opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. So life gets in the way and you don't have that opportunity, so I'm glad you did. Or you find little ways to do it. You know, when I was raising my kids, I would take courses because that was a way for me to tell my family that I would be away for this chunk of time.

Yeah. And to schedule it in. And then I come home and say, I had homework. But that also opened a lot of doors because I took ceramics. You know, things, I took cartography. Painting with lots of different people. Printmaking. So it was a way to keep working and stay sane. Particularly ceramics for my kids were younger.

I would go on Friday nights and pound clay with a group of fabulous women who also had children, and we'd talk about our week. We hand-built, we'd make ceramics, and I did that probably for at least ten years at the Worcester Center for crafts, and it was a lifeline. Yeah, it was a creative outlet. So that's so that's how I did it.

We all have our ways. So I was looking on your website earlier, and I remember that we talked specifically about your Family Debris series when you spoke to the repurposing Collective. But what I didn't realize at that time, I guess I didn't dive deeply into your website enough, is that has been going on for decades now. 15 or 16 years.

Yeah. Yeah. It it started, because my kids were getting older and I was trying to purge some of their stuff. I was faced with the realization that we had so much stuff. I was shocked. You know, because you have three kids, three different rooms. I just was appalled because, you know, as I sort of mentioned earlier, that's not how I grew up, right?

We didn't have all that money. It wasn't all about acquisition. You waited. You know, it wasn't sort of instant gratification, but somehow I bought into that, whether it was the climate at the time, I don't know. So I was really pretty appalled. I tried to donate some of it at that time. There was a different ethos, so people didn't want old stuff, which was it was really weird to me now.

You know, goodwill would take it. But a lot of it was plastic, and I knew that it was what I call the my statement archival to a fault was going to be around forever. I like that archival to a fault. Yeah. So I thought, well, you know, as an artist, I'm always looking for materials. I'm always looking for things to make other things with.

So why not embrace this debris and start to explore making art with that? And I think I mentioned in our earlier meeting, the first one I did was Duplo blocks, which are the young kids version of Lego blocks, which we'll never, never deteriorate. I mean, they'll be around after we're long gone. So at the time, I was really obsessed.

I've always been obsessed with circles, the circular form and what follows is the. Oh, and for some reason that that point out, I noticed that there were a million compound words and phrases with the word out, so I started. This is an artist's approach to living. I started obsessively listing them. Because it was sort of a discovery, and I like, I like wordplay, I like text.

So I made a child sized chair out of two clothes, painted it black, and then scratched the small with these words without into it, calling it the timeout chair. And I put phrases, and compound words that I thought related to childhood and to me, you know, out of my mind, I think there are endless. And it was very therapeutic.

You know, the chair is almost like on a little throne. And that was my first family debris piece. And weirdly, it came to me. You may experience this. I have multiple times. Sort of. It appeared in my mind, fully formed. Oh, wow. And usually when that happens, the the end result or the product does not resemble that first thing that that piece did.

So when you scratch into the black paint, it was like scratch for it that we played with as kids and it got into a show. So that sort of set me off on the on a world of family debris. And it was a long time ago and people were not. People are using repurposed materials all the time now, but not then, not very much then.

And I think people I remember that I because I was always interested in repurposed materials. And even 15 years ago I was sort of looking into it and it wasn't what it what it is now. So it wasn't as easy to find. But I do remember having it being that that was not it was not ubiquitous. Right? It was just it was rare.

Right. Repurposing your family of stuff has many. It's like a family archive. It's a family history. You've already purchased it, so you own it. It's scrappy, which is a good thing, you know, you're not buying something else. I did set parameters, and that is that as I became more well known for using repurposed and recycled materials, people are always offering them to me.

Always. Yeah. And the one parameter is I only use what I already own. I only use my own stuff with a couple of exceptions. Couple. But, you know, my husband is very patient, and people go, so are you a hoarder? Is your house full to the top? And no, not really. It has a I do have a lot of stuff.

It's very well organized, but I do have a lot. But sometimes as things are going out the door, I'll notice there are a lot of things that sort of catch my eye. And then I will start collecting them specific, like, like toothbrushes. At one point. Plastic cards that for a while were ubiquitous and came and everything.

We talked about this contact lens pods. So sometimes certain things will catch my eye. I'm like, okay, I can envision using those and something and I'm going to hang on to them. I use a lot. I hang on to a lot of plastic packaging. Plastic. You know, a lot of food comes in plastic bags. We talked about this before.

Organic food and plastic. Yeah. Really? So I save that stuff and as you and I and a lot of people have recognized how ubiquitous and devastating and toxic plastic is. I've made more of an effort to save that, which is a little bit painful, but I feel like it should be reused. Yeah. And also, as you know, it deteriorates at different rates.

Yeah. I've done some early work over ten years ago that has a lot of caps and tops, and some of them do begin to break down and then I replace them. I hang on to this stuff. It's sort of its own, you know, crazy ness. It is. But I think we are all artists. No matter what media we use.

There is a certain amount of craziness involved. And we just kind of I think we have to cherish that craziness because it makes us who we are. Yeah. And aren't we lucky? I mean, to feel comfort and passion. That's how I would. And joy in the making and struggle and pain. Get it all? It all is. It's an honor to be able to have that shape our lives, I think.

And I have friends who don't have that, and they've talked a lot to me about how I hate to use the word envy, but how envious they are that I do feel passionate about making art. And, you know, if you don't have something like that, you gotta find something. I, I agree, I think you need to weather it and it could be something, I don't know.

It could be a passion for reading, for goodness or running or, you know, anything. Yeah. Or for your family, I mean, I think or for volunteering, but I feel very much, I'm. I'm not a loner, but I do have, notices, so I do like my own company. Yeah. I mean, and I think probably most artists feel that way.

I do collaborate from time to time. I haven't recently, and I do find that has huge benefits and sort of an exponential increase of energy and some interesting way. Yeah, I agree. I, I crave my alone time. I love that in my studio I, it can be hours and then I'm all alone and just, you know, tinkering whether I'm working on something specific or I'm just cleaning my studio, organizing my supplies, I enjoy that, which is a good thing.

Sorting is a fun thing, right? Sorting is important. We we learned in kindergarten. Yeah. Sorting sometimes leads to a lot of trouble. Because as I'm swimming, I'm noticing things and I'm like, oh, I know what I want to make from this. And then the sorting that's. It's okay. It's good. It's inspiration. Yes, absolutely. So your, family debris serious?

Like how largest you've had some some immersive installations. Yeah, it's it's big. Artists have one particular problem, and I certainly suffer from it. And that storage. Especially if you make sculpture anything three dimensional. Yeah. I do have a tendency to take apart old work, particularly sculpture, and reuse the pieces in other ways. Which is also an adventure and fun.

I like that. So the immersive, show that you mentioned, I used a lot of pieces from different. They're all family debris pieces, but from different shows. And I, you know, made new work. So it was a coming together. I had another show at the gallery that no longer exists where I had them dump a truckload of stuff from my garage.

I'm embarrassed to say that, but yeah, our garage does not hold cars. In the in the gallery. And I had a week to put together a show. I did enlist my sister and a couple other people for labor and assistance, but it was a challenge I had shown in that gallery many times in fact, my studio at that point was downstairs from that, from this giant, wonderful gallery called the Sprinkler Factory, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore.

But it was something I always dreamt about that I wanted the whole space and, it was overwhelming, but exciting. I bet it was very exciting. It was, you know, the culmination of internal, you know, design and creativity that have been going on for a long time. Yeah. So, yeah, I have a lot of family debris stuff. But you're you're so but it also it's very varied.

Like I there's sculptures and those are the most I think I don't know that I want to use the word powerful, but I guess they're the, the, the most catch the most attention making. Yes, the most intention. But you also do minor prints and and classics within the series. How does that work? Well, I, I've been a printmaker.

I was a painter for a long time, and when I had kids, I didn't want to paint with turf. I didn't have a studio at the time, but I didn't want to paint with oil paint or turf in my house, so I needed to find an alternative. So I knew friends who were part of the Blackstone Print Studio, which was a co-operative, and I had printed in high school, but not since.

So I became a part of that. And I think that was in the 90s, the late 90s, and I started printing, and initially I was doing things when my mother died. I did a lot of things from photographs that she had, did a lot of stuff with circles, always. So it's been there. We're going to go back to circles later.

Exactly. A lot about circles. And then, when I really started getting going on the Family Debris series, I collected flat and flat materials and things that had a little bit of dimension. So I would layer, I would ink a large plexi plate and I place them randomly, maybe not randomly on a plate, and I use a kind of paper called reef VFC, which is a really thick recognized paper stamp in it.

You sort of a blanket over it and put it to the press. So then I get sort of embossed items and sort of silhouettes or solid forms of them, and you could get 3 or 4 passes with the same inked plate because you would ship things around, you turn them over, and so you'd end up with four images.

And then I do another color with the same, with the same prints. So I started to layer the family debris. In a way. I thought about it later. It's almost as you might find it in a landfill. But what I liked about it is that people, if they. Well, when you first came in and saw the work, it was pretty much an abstract color, form, shape thing.

And if you went closer and look carefully, you could begin to pick out objects, objects that were familiar to you. Yeah. And so was another degree of interaction, recognition and again, family debris, things that everybody has. I've been doing that for a really long time. And then I started to become larger and I started to make sculptures out of them, where I print on both sides and I create paper sculpture forms, stitching them together.

All of my prints for the last ten plus years, I usually collage printed materials like, I don't just like anything else, I don't waste anything. So if at the end of a print session I have ink on my plate, I'll take some paper and get that ink with its texture on that, on that paper, or if I cut or shape some print, I'll use it somewhere else as collage.

So what about the materials that you ink? I, I save them, number one, and sometimes I collage them onto the prints at the end because they have an inked between. Right. So it's that whole like use it all or I say waste not, want not which a lot of people say, but that is sort of my approach.

And you'd be surprised at how many times the things that the end of a print session, like those color blocks or those colored pieces of paper, you know, sometimes I'll add texture to them, are sort of the stepping off point of a whole new batch of work. Oh, I love that. So I really, you know, I love it and I love printmaking, I do I've been talking about this like maybe talk to you about this until the point where I do miss painting because it's a gestural large movement and everything I do is very small, repetitive.

I stitch on my prints. I love stitching on my prints, and that's sort of a meditative thing, collage. But I do miss that big gestural thing. So I may do something in my studio, not necessarily for human consumption or anyone I know. I have, some art, some painter friends, and I love watching videos of them on Instagram, and they're painting and they're all these big movements, and I get a little jealous of that.

Yeah, well, this is what I would say to do because this is what I've been doing. I will put a big piece of paper on my wall in my studio and it's like, respite for taking a break, and I'll just make marks on it. Oh, I like that. And you know, whether anything useful will come out of it doesn't really matter as much as it's very freeing.

And you get to explore color and mark making and, it's like taking a little vacation from your, you know, closer work. And I started doing that when I would go on, residencies because you have more space there in my studio, and I would use a drop cloth. I put a drop cloth on the wall and just sort of play with it, and it's satisfying.

Yeah, it's not a great work of art, but it's satisfying, right? Yeah. You know. Yeah. I'm, So a friend has asked me to do some painting for him. For some. Just for some samples. I'm actually looking forward to it, because it's not going to be something that I'll display in a gallery or even think about it, but I'm looking forward to just playing with some paint in the right.

It's really my paint these days is maybe for the edges of an artwork or a little bit, you know, in the artwork, but very little. So you're ready. It's time. Why not? I'll play with it. Let's see what happens. And that is why a lot of the family debris is a diverse body of work. It has printmaking is mixed media, it has sculpture and it has installation.

Because being the selfish artist I am, I want to do what I want to do. Yeah, and that's not just one thing. I don't have a gallery. Oh, well, I'm participating in some galleries, but, you know, I don't want to keep making the same thing. Oh, no. Absolutely. I agree with that. I mean, you know, there's so many, teachers or critics or whatever that tell you that you have to pick a niche.

I think about it sometimes I'm like, but if I do pick a niche, then I can't do that other thing that I really like. Wing. Right? I we're very fortunate that we can do that broad spectrum of a broad range of work. Not everyone has that option. And I do recognize that, you know, every now and then, I mean, another artist who goes, I just want to make what I want to make.

And I'm like, yeah, yes, I get that. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about encaustic. Now I know nothing about encaustic have never tried it, but I do understand it's a wax process. Right, right. But you're using it with family debris. Yeah, that's older work. And I did go through a whole period, and that was the period where I was dealing a lot with old toys.

I, I took a class across the class because a lot of people were working in encaustic at the time, and it's beeswax and pine rosin together. It's a certain formulation. Smells great, it's translucent and has a beautiful sort of depth to it. I used it to, create scenarios or vignettes. You know, I, I the first two that I made were really the tiniest bits of toys that I found under the bed in a drawer, you know, like all that crap that is from something else, like broken bits or, my, my kids, like, lots of tiny little things.

So I, I made little vignettes no one would ever recognize them, but I placed them in, in the wax. And when you work with in caustic, you have to fuze it. It's a layered approach, so you fuze it to harden it. And it takes a lot of time, but you have to keep it within a certain temperature range so that it doesn't give off toxic fumes.

Plus you need to have very good ventilation. Okay. Did I have those things? I'm not sure I did. So I went through a whole period where I use toys in different ways. You know how we talked about sometimes when comes to you fully formed? I had a show coming up and I was doing all these and classic pieces, and one late night I made three that were just sort of came out of me.

The next day I looked at them and I completely understood what they were, but at the time I was making them now I made one that was called, I don't remember the first one, the second one was raised and launched. So the first one sort of made a nod to creating a baby toys. And then the second one was raising baby, you know, or the child, and then the third one was launching the child.

So the first one, the encaustic, was white and pearly, the second one, it was blue, and the third one was sort of black, like you were launching them out into space. I don't know where that came from, but they were completely made. By the next morning. I stayed up really late, so sometimes things just just come up. And then I use some of my kids old toys again to talk about childhood.

One I used, little plastic toys, like furniture and that I have two girls had and it was called abandoned Rooms. And then one, I use a lot of different cars that my all my kids and not just my son, and I think it was called empty lots. And then I had all this miscellaneous stuff left over at night.

I put them in a grid and I think I called them, unexplained human beings and found something, something weird. So I would do them in series and I really liked them. I enjoyed making them, but I'll be honest, I didn't necessarily feel great at some point. I was like, I still have all my encaustic stuff and I'll go back to it at some point.

I keep thinking that the next time I do it, I'll make it outside. I thought I had good ventilation, but I'm not sure if I did. Yeah, so I have to ask an unrelated, well, related related questions. Did your children ever protest your use of their materials? Well, that's a very good question and a very interesting answer.

So my oldest, you know, as she was cleaning up, she would give me a black plastic bags of stuff to get rid of. And at this point I was looking at stuff for making art. So I used it and she came to a show and she was upset and I, I, I still feel badly about this. I should have asked her, but in my mind she had identified it as garbage.

So I use it and I think she felt that it was invasive. Not that I had her name attached to it. For whatever reason it bothered her and I felt really bad, and I felt I felt like as a mother, I really should have run it by her. So that was my oldest, my middle child to support who loves it.

I actually just gave him one of the pieces. He just liked it. And my youngest, who's a girl, kept bringing me her current toys and going, how about this? How about that? Like she what? She wanted to participate. So that's three different kids. Yeah, three different reactions. But. So, but it was very, eye opening to me because even if you think it's not personal, someone's garbage just.

Yeah. You know, so when I use the family debris, they now know that, you know, stuff that's left is going to end up in the family debris. So, so now they know if there's something they don't want to I end up. That's right. That I give it to you. That's right. And I use a lot of textile and clothes also.

And they don't really care about that. I try to give away a lot of the clothes, but sometimes the color, the pattern, I use it. There's so much history with those things. Almost more with the clothes and the toys for me, because this is what I purchase. This is what they wore. I remember the 80s. They were exactly.

So that's that's like walking down memory lane. And it's very revelatory to me what their own personal palettes were, because they did have them. Yeah. So it's like it is revisiting. There's a lot of pleasure in the family debriefing. Yeah. I'm appalled. I used to call it pleasurable penance. Looking this are, but that seems a little, I don't know.

Seems not kind. It seems a little cheeky, so I don't say that as often, but in a lot of ways, that's what it is. It's pleasurable. And it's it's a way for me to examine everything that we bought. I don't know how you grew up, but that was not how I know that. It's not how we grew up, but I grew up at all.

Yeah, I mean completely, and maybe that's part of what fueled it. I actually have tried to figure out, you know, when you have three kids, it's just so bizarre. You're just like, nothing is really right. Just about the other thing. And and maybe there is a little underlying I didn't have that opportunity or I don't know. So I think that's true because we grew up my my brother, well, my brother is six years younger than me, but we grew up not having much.

Yeah, my parents worked very hard and didn't have a lot. So everything that we did get was pretty precious. And I think that when I was raising my two girls, we had a much wealthier, I should say, lifestyle than I did growing up. So I think part of it was because I was like, I didn't have that, but you can have it, right?

So part of it is I'm sure it is my fault. So that wasn't conscious at the time. I'm sure I'm thinking that it's just like a behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny because when we were moving and we had a downsize and they were, you know, they were about to go to college and or a college was in the near future, but we had to downsize from the home that they grew up in.

And that was rather difficult for them. Yeah. Yeah. More difficult than it was for me. I even though I did most of the physical work right. I do think that and I recognize this now. My kids are young adults and they're still in the acquisition phase of their lives. That's true. And I'm in the decisioning part of my life.

So it's easier for me to say, get rid of it, but it's still so loaded with emotion and childhood for them. It's hard for them to do and and I think at that point they don't even know what they still want. So I am hanging on to like books and things like that, because I do think it will become more of an issue as they have children.

Yeah. No, it's true, I have we have boxes in storage which now haven't been looked at in probably close to three years and probably will not get looked at for another ten years or so. Yeah, yeah that's okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hold onto them for now. So you know, I, I do feel like, you know, there is this whole issue of being a mother and making art is a very difficult thing.

And I think it has more attention now than ever. And I appreciate that because, you know, I have a friend whenever I mention a very successful, groundbreaking female artist for instantly say to me, does she have kids? That's true. Yeah. It's true. So but I do think, you know, I see some younger female artists right now who are making it work and really saying that it has an important place for them and they're going to figure out a way to do it.

And I encourage, yeah, no, I agree. I encourage them to I sometimes think back to my own younger years and think, oh, I should have done more. Why didn't I pursue that? I don't know, life circumstances, whatever. You know, different times, you know, I did things like paint, scenery for my kids or paint things for prom walls. You know, you do.

Yeah. I did that for you. For my kids. School plays. Exactly. Really outrageous costumes. Yeah, I enjoyed every moment of it. Yeah. And I'll remember that. So, you know, you do what you can do. Exactly. But again, we're fortunate we're doing it. Yes, exactly. All right. I have one more question. Well, I have two more questions. So you do some environmental sculpture as well.

Outdoor sculpture. Right. Can you tell me a little bit about that. Well, the actually the second or third family debris piece that I made was called Found Nest after Ice Storm. We had a very historic ice storm in my area where almost every tree lost its top. So the roads were blocked. We didn't have electricity for 7 or 8 days.

The whole yard was just covered with debris. So there was, a program called Art in the Park in Worcester. And I always wanted to do an outdoor piece. So I thought, okay, I'm going to use, some of these down branches. So I made a very large scale, large scale nest, and then I took rocks from the side of the road and wrapped them in some of the inner part of the downed electrical cables.

So it was very colorful. And that was my first, outdoor piece. Oh, wow. And kids love to sit in it. So I had to come and sort of lift up the sides again. But, you know, that's that's fine. And then after that, I think it was the following year I did probably one of my favorite. This is less sort of an environmentally sensitive piece, but it was something that was, in my mind had to do with household materials.

We live in an old house, and I had seen the silver aluminum duct that went from a dryer to the outside. It was very long and I loved it again, circular, like a slinky. I also have a big history with Slinkys. And I was like, you know, this is a great material. So what I had noticed in the park was that a lot of the work was vulnerable because, you know, it's inner city people do stuff.

So I thought, oh, I'll put it in the ponds, you know, they'll be completely safe. So I got some post-consumer styrofoam that a business had gotten new computers and had a ton of stuff. These tubes clamped them and made rings, 57 of them. Oh my gosh. And balls. I used oh, play balls that my kids had and wrap them in, silver emergency blankets and with hair ties and put them, with an old pantyhose to a paracord and then to, a cinder block so that they, they sort of moved around on the surface.

Oh, it was really nice. Was that the it was a sunk. Right. So it was called the water rings and bubbles. And you could see it from the road and the rings would just move around. Oh, I love that. And it was. Oh, well, the best part was I experimented in my neighborhood. We had a pond nearby, so I got some waders and I installed these on this little pond.

I'd walk across the road. The people next door to us were trying to sell their house. If you just let me know. I walked down there, down the road in my waders with my kiddo. And that was its own environmental experience, because I'd be there at the end of the day, one little bullfrog would start to make noise, and then another, and then another, and it would be this crescendo of sound that actually vibrated my head because I'd been there.

So long and it was dark and I was standing still. It was a profound experience. Oh, wow. So that was part of probably the best environmental part. So I, I've made a couple of outside things. So lately I've been using plastic. Because again, I want to bring attention to. Yeah. How you think, how how how is the plastic surviving outdoors, or are they not there for there?

They're all temporary pieces. They're there for a couple of months. But I am dealing with, re repurposing. I had done a piece in Concord where I asked people to to bring in their recyclable plastic to the umbrella Art center for two weeks, and then I made a plastic wave out of it. Yes. Was big. And now I'm repurposing that plastic.

So I'm reusing, so, yeah, you know, I like doing stuff outside. We have what I call the sculpture graveyard, which is all pieces around my house, much to my husband's dismay. But, I'm surprised at how much how they last. Yeah, yeah. And some of them I reuse in different ways, but, you know, some of them are just like, well, the nest I put in my garden.

And it was very exciting because I watched it decompose. And that was what was supposed to happen right there. So yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was really eye opening to me. And, you know, I like that sort of, possibility of ephemeral art. Not with plastic. Not plastic becomes microplastic, which is inside of us. So that is one thing I wanted to say.

You know, initially all of the family debris came out of sort of this personal penance, for our personal consumption and not wanting to put it back out into the world. But in those 16 years, you know, climate change, we were witnessing it. We're living it. So my concern is broadening from the personal to the global. You know, I want people to look at my work and say, oh, I have all that stuff, you know?

And consumerism fuels, fuels climate change because all of it emits, greenhouse gases. So, you know, I have this struggle, because I want it to be visually engaging. I want to get their attention, and some people will just pressure. I'm like, oh, that's so pretty or oh, that's so colorful. Okay. You know, whether or not you get your attention, their attention is pretty in the colorful, right?

So if they want to take a little more time with it. So understand for example, the installation had the soundtrack of nature because I wanted people to realize that if we continue with this kind of immersion of plastic that will be lost, that will be gone, it will be a record. Yeah, it won't be real. So in that way, my my work has, I hope, has a bigger reach.

You know, I hope it's gotten beyond where people that are. I will say this, kids and young adults love my work because they recognize the components. Oh, I had a Polly Pocket. You know, I had that matchbox. So. And that's good because again, it gets their attention. But I really want people to, to look at the bigger picture.

And I, I think use you're doing that also. And I think we all struggle with well how do we how do we do that. You know, how do we really do that. Yeah. I think you keep doing it. That's the key. Yeah, that's the key. Yeah, I know it's it's a struggle. One more question. Sure, but tell me about your circles.

I know you love circles. I have this really wonderful Circling Around series that you post on Instagram. Yeah. How did that come about? Well, again, I do love circles and we could get into a whole discussion about what a circle means universally and personally. But, you know, it's the purity of form. It's the curvilinear nature. It's the ultimate symmetry.

It's centering, it's inclusion, exclusion. There's so many things, you know, center on the circle. So I like to spend time outside. I like to walk. And I began to notice that nature has circles or arcs or curves. And I started taking pictures of, not just nature, but, you know, urban situations. So I started to take pictures of them and post them in a blog in 2011.

At that point it was called Daily Rounds, but I was like, that sounds like I'm a doctor. So I got rid of I got rid of that title. So I started calling it Circling Round. And I think for the first year it posted one every day. That was my own personal challenge. And then I sort of slowed down and people are like, I really missed your circle.

I really missed your circle. So I kept doing it. But I gave myself permission not to do it every day because I didn't want to spend my time looking for circles I wanted to experience or find them as I move through my day. So that was, I think it was 2011. And then at some point, blogs were less prominent and I started to post them on Facebook, and that got a bigger audience.

So I always put circling round the date always, but usually. And three lines that I don't think anyone reads them. I mean, to give people a sense of how I was feeling or where I found it, or what the weather was. You know, it just sort of, context. Yeah. And people respond to them. Some people probably know me more for the circling round posts than anything I do.

And I laughed at my husband. I circling round of way more likes than any of my art, which is fun. It's fun. It's. But they're lovely. Like I saw the one that you posted this morning, and there was quite a few pictures in there. Yeah. And I obviously can't recall them all, but I'm recalling the two that really, I guess, grabbed my attention was a branch with the droplets.

Yeah, it's a v shaped breath. And then the other one was the melting snow. So I'm assuming they were like the little dry little divots in the in the melting snow there. There were just so there was just something very delicate and poetic about them, but ephemeral art, which I like, particularly after my mother was ill. I recognize that part of the end of life experiences that you are almost hermetically sealed somewhere.

You can't get out, you can't move through the world. And I do love landscape landscape architect and I decided at that point in time, I'm going to make an effort to spend some time outside every day for if I can. And I used to be a runner. I'm older now, so I walk. I love to walk. I love to move through the landscape.

I love to experience the landscape. I love sort of registering that change in the light seas and time of day, you know, all of that. Yeah. So what happened to the circling round? Is it it transformed from actual circles, arcs, which there still are a lot to a metaphorical circling round of me walking through the landscape and starting in one place and coming back.

And what I see, sharing what I see. Sometimes some pictures are more successful than others, and I just want people to get a sense of what it was like to be outside. Also, I'd like to encourage people, you know, you know, oh, you're so lucky. Yeah, I can go outside now more than I could in the past.

If I'm not working full time, it does fuel everything I do. And it's sort of the, the backdrop to environmental art or climate or, you know, how things change, how we interact with nature, all that nature gives us. I mean, a lot of the stuff I'll post is patterns, I mean, and abstractions. Nature does it better than we, we, and the randomness of it.

So, you know, at times I, I will I won't do very many circling rounds and like today's was an accumulation of a couple of days walking down. And I do love fog. Fog is just so wonderful. I got fog. It's wonderful. So, you know, in my mind often they were two separate practices, but more than one person has said, you know, they really do respond to each other.

They interact. A lot of my artwork is with manmade stuff. Yeah. So this is and there's circles. There's so many circles. Yeah. I can't get enough of those circles. But yeah. So I appreciate you asking me about that, and I, I will probably always do that because I like to take pictures when I walk.

I can't capture everything I see, you know, not at all, but some possible. Yeah. And sometimes I, I hit the right note and sometimes it's not like a great picture, but it gives you a sense of what I'm experiencing. Yeah. And I'd like them to know now they're wonderful. Thank you as well. Well, thank you so much for this conversation, Lisa.

This was I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it too, Natalia. And I look forward to it. I don't know how you do all of what you do, by the way. Well, we can talk about that. And yes, we will sometimes. But, you know, we all work hard and long and people say that to me, but I don't see that.

But you do a lot and I appreciate is an off people like you who do so much. I mean, we all do what we can and what we are passionate about. So and everyone's passions are different. So. But you generously share all this, this information that you discover along the way and share people, you know, that's open the door.

So we meet people that an artist that we won't necessarily know. And that's a great thing. So, you know, I think that's important because there's so many of us. And sometimes we get especially for climate artists. I think sometimes we get into we can get into a depressive state because things are so bleak at times. Yes. That's why I think it's important for all of us to know how many of us are out there, that we're not alone in this.

That would be a good forum, by the way, to talk to have a group of climate artists talk about how do we reach people like we all do different kind of art, but all with the same goal. So what's working, what's not? You know, how can we consolidate that information and really make a I don't know, I don't know, but I think there's a symposium in there somewhere.

Yeah, I agree, I agree, I agree. Well listen thank you so much. Oh thank you. They said this was great. That was such a great conversation. We could have kept talking for another couple hours. I think, I especially loved Lisa's line archival to a fault. I might have to steal that for myself from now on. Maybe it'll be a title for our next artwork.

We'll see. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you are enjoying season two of Salvage. I am so delighted to be able to have these wonderful conversations with so many people. So I invite you to take a look at my Art at Art by natalya.com. I invite you to take a look of what you can learn with me at Eco Loop dot Art, and I also invite you if you're interested in being a repurposed material artist yourself, to join the Repurposer Collective. To do so, go to Repurposer collective.com and put your name on the waitlist. The doors will open for Earth Month. That's April. I'll see you there. This podcast was created, produced and edited by me, Natalya Khorover, theme music by RC Guida.