Artist Statement

At the heart of my practice is attentive engagement with living systems, with materials, and with the recurring patterns of the natural world. I work through experimentation, observation, and documentation, beginning in forests and fields, gardens, herbaria, and everyday ecologies. Process-driven visual language shaped by assertive mark-making, formal intensity, and the resistance of print surfaces is central to my approach, as is a curiosity shaped by scientific and field-based experience.

Trained as an ecologist, with over a decade spent working as a botanist and wildlife biologist in western Canada, my artistic practice grows directly out of sustained time spent outdoors, listening, recording, collecting. I am interested in how relationships reveal themselves through careful looking, and how creative practice can guide deeper engagement with place and ecology.

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, the chemistry and nuance of etching, and the openness of monotype. These processes allow me to work deliberately and responsively, developing images through a tension of intention and improvisation, hand and material.

Alongside print, I regularly incorporate writing, sound recording, soundscape composition, time-based media such as stop-motion animation. Birdsong, migration, microscopy, and plant forms and functions recur throughout my work, agents that shape 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.

By working closely with materials, patterns, and natural processes, my practice creates encounters that invite reflection and connection.

Lisa Matthias