Artist Statement

My work begins with sustained observation and research, exploring how environments are shaped through both natural processes and human presence. As an interdisciplinary artist and trained ecologist, I work through experimentation and documentation, beginning in forests and fields, gardens and urban settings, museums, and everyday ecologies. These observations are translated through the physical process of printmaking, where carving, layering, and repetition become a way of understanding and reinterpreting the world.

Printmaking is essential to my work. I am drawn to the structural clarity and physicality of print media: the carved surface and distilled form of woodcut, and the chemistry and nuance of etching. These processes allow me to work deliberately and responsively, developing images through a tension between intention and improvisation, hand and material. The slow process of carving wood or etching metal allows for a deep engagement with subject matter, while the act of printing introduces transformation and variation.

I regularly work in shared spaces - classrooms, printmaking studios, and community settings - where creating has a collective dimension. Through teaching and residencies, other people enter into the processes of printmaking and observation, and these exchanges can shape how the work develops.

Alongside print, I incorporate writing, sound recording, and time-based media such as stop-motion animation. Birds, plants, insects, and landscapes - their forms and functions - recur throughout my work, shaping both content and method. Across media, I am interested in how pattern operates visually and ecologically, and how attention to small, often overlooked phenomena can shift how we understand place.

At its core, my practice, a fusion of artistic and scientific inquiry, is about connection, between place, material, and lived experience, and to the subtle relationships that influence how we experience the environments we inhabit.

Lisa Matthias