Lise van Wersch
I am a visual artist. My medium is sculpture. My concept-based practice understands itself as an archive of fleeting feelings made lasting. I work with clay, plaster, brass, paper and found materials carrying a previous life. Everyday objects, found things, and the discarded. Combined with my clay models and cast in plaster through wasted moulds, these become sculptural archives against forgetting. Always with one aim: to satisfy my curiosity about being human – to find myself in others, and to be found. Rendering the deeply personal precisely enough that it becomes a shared, recognisable space of experiences.
My works play with the struggle for visibility in a world full of inequalities. I explore the depths of humanity and go on a journey in search of empathy. The central idea of my artistic research is: “How to see yourself in others?”.
What does it mean to be human and how does that actually work? The banality and the simultaneity of the depth of being human touch my work just as much as the idea that art is a tool in the fight against social injustice. My work raises essential questions about the meaning of humanity. Where do the depths of interpersonal relationships begin? When does tension arise and when do dark depths open up?
I look for ways to transform memories into physical, tactile forms and create immersive environments. In doing so, I make anger, melancholia, curiosity and fear visible. I draw strength from the confrontation with all feelings existing and with my art I dare to make an activistic contribution to the healing of collective trauma. My work is feminist and conceptual – an archive of memories, stories and materials that preserves the traces of humanity, tries to understand them and tells them again and again.
My objects carry memories within them; they tell stories through the choice of materials and textures. As a material and technique enthusiast, I combine classic sculpting techniques such as working with clay and plaster with my own methods, as creative tools: “bring it into my world, understand, adapt, change, repeat and put it back”. Repetition makes the familiar seem new and strange at the same time.
My work is rarely formed in digital ways. Prominently by a collective sculpture that has been growing for several years, called The Sirens Collective.
Despite the diversity of my working methods, my oeuvre follows a consistent artistic theme. The issues overlap again and again and constantly pose the same, sometimes more, sometimes less, big questions. These questions can be described by terms such as curiosity, patina, gloom, courage, memory, nostalgia, fear, anger, fun and hope. Characterized by humour, a childlike nostalgia and a sentimentality that balances between kitsch and minimalism, renaissance and brutalism, I create spaces and objects that invite viewers to see themselves and others anew.
A new form of humanity can perhaps be discovered in my layers of memories, objects and sentiments.
Foto: Kim Hoss
education
2021-2023
MFA Sculpture
Royal Academy of Fine Arts
Antwerp, BE
2017 – 2021
B.A. Accessory Design
Hochschule Pforzheim – Fakultät für Gestaltung
Pforzheim, GER
2012 – 2016
custom tailor
fashion design
pattern maker
Academy of Fashion & Design
Hannover, GER