Board member Lisa Heisler is exhibiting her work this month (September) at Mama Sita’s in Winlaw. Animal Brides – Mythic Imagination is a series of Lisa’s artwork created with the assistance of a Slocan Valley Community Arts Council member grant.
ANIMAL BRIDES – MYTHIC IMAGINATION
Lisa Heisler 2019
The series is original digital and encaustic work. Photos of friends on their wedding day transformed into wild creatures they have a kinship with. I used an eclectic mix of images from nature and photos of found objects or meaningful items such as cloth my mother embroidered.
In old myths, women are known to step into human skin. They often marry and bear children. When the time is ripe, they return to the wild to re-claim their animate ways.
She may appear before you now as lover, wife, mother. But things are never as they seem, and the wild embers burn inside her.
Myth helps us make meaning from lived experience. The animal brides walk us through the seasons of a woman’s life. Crow acts as a messenger from the underworld squawking of a well-seasoned life. Deer boasts maiden spring energy. All things have a season and a story. Nothing is static. The seasons of a woman’s life don’t come but once, rather again and again. This series is meant to connect us to the wild, to story, and to the cycles women spiral through.
Wherever possible, I have tried to reference Celtic mythology – a tether to part of my ancestral line.
