Lisa Clague 1999
My
work evokes a place between the subconscious and the intangible. My masked
figures are hybrid creatures, mistresses of ambiguity and disguise, of seduction
and deception. These images like dreams are familiar but illusive. Dreams
compress and heighten reality. They may bring delightful fantasy or feverish
fear, fusion of overlaying images reflects desire, anxiety and the poetic lure
of many inner worlds. Fairy tales, childhood games and masks, hallucinations,
ghosts, insects, animals, bones and worms, are images in a passageway between
what is dreamt what is lived, what is remembered and what is to come.
Although
the imagery in my work comes directly from my own dreams which, in turn, respond
to very personal experiences. I must also acknowledge a debt to the surrealist
movement. Artists such as Hieronymous Bosch, Frida Karlo, Louise Bourgeois and
Hans Bellmer have been profoundly inspirational.
My
hybrid figures have been influenced by prehistoric art, the “Great Mother”
figurines from the Neolithic period, the animal-headed figures from the rock
shelter of La Madeleine, and also the bird-headed Egyptian Goddesses and archaic
Greek Kouros figures.