Lisa Garland is interested in our need to control and dominate, more like, she is drawn towards the imagery that deviates from this necessity. She is attracted to the folk that do not conform to society ‘rules’. She likes the gardener that allows a blackberry vine to have a place, the dweller who montages his bedroom wall because he can, the coastal resider who dedicates hours to maintaining his fish trap. Garland turns her back on the conformist, the man in the spot light. She wants to hunt out the true humble gems she finds in abundance on the North West and West Coast of Tasmania. Her home.
The things I choose to use to make art with are within my reach. They are part of my immediate sphere, close to home and mostly attainable in vast quantities. I break them up and use the pieces to make something else. I exploit the stuff of them – the colours, materiality and availability. The finished work and the path to get there is just as close. An impulse to accumulate, find patterns, global and ancestral connections to decoration; these things matter to me and always make themselves apparent in the end.