Artist Lisa Roet’s work challenges the viewer to consider their relationship to the non human animal; the animals around us, distant from us in zoos, in the ever shrinking wilderness, or within us, their very tissue and valves now used in surgery. We share the planet with animals and man share their bodies with the animal. Lisa Roet’s career has been spent interrogating this barrier, in highly public displays of her work.
As one of more than 25 artists whose work will feature in the upcoming RMIT Gallery exhibition Revelations: Works from the RMIT Collection (23 May to 12 July) http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=zu5lgkl47isz, Lisa speaks to Evelyn Tsitas about the revelations of her own practice:
The RMIT Art Collection provides a considerable overview of Australian art history and includes some of the most highly regarded and successful artists that both the country and the University have produced. What prompted your decision to study at RMIT?
I was interested in RMIT as its course was more structured and less fashion based in its philosophy than other courses at the time. I have always strived in my art practice to create my own pathway and the course allowed and encouraged its students to do this – plus I was interested in the philosophy subjects offered to obtain this degree.
The RMIT Art Collection’s purpose is to tell the history of the University through the creative output of its staff and alumni, and to reflect RMIT’s core values of innovation, creativity, sustainability and social engagement. Tell us how your passion for animals has developed over your career.
I was interested in studying anthropology/zoology while in high school but doing poorly in physics and Chemistry in year 11 changed this path and I focused on making art. While studying painting at RMIT I used the image of the animal within my works including a series of large meat carcass paintings in second year produced after sitting in the butcher’s cooling rooms of the Victoria Market throughout the year.
After finishing my BAFA I travelled and ended in Berlin where I revisited my interest in animal communication and anthropology. I started to observe animals as a metaphor for the society in which they live (at the same time reflecting upon how Australian society treats its Flora and Fauna). The animals and works I focused on in Berlin reflected the environment of the time with the Berlin wall coming down and the racial juxtaposition between Eastern and Western cultures and the tensions that arose between these people. Since Berlin I have been working with scientists and research teams to create my works
The exhibition Revelations tells the story of RMIT’s history as one of the homes of high modernism in Australian sculpture through to figurative work. Was your own work ever abstract? Or have you always been attracted to the body – animal and or human?
I think my sculpture works between figurative and abstract. The Bronze Fingers for example while being representative and figurative, by being separated from the hand could be read as an abstract form. At present I am working on scaling up palm lines found in a particular gorilla I worked with many years ago in Berlin Zoo. These palm lines will be presented individually as large bronze works and will be read as Abstract pieces though come directly from the figurative.
Your work at this year’s White Night Melbourne festival was literally drawn from your own life and open heart surgery. How did it feel to put yourself in your work and expose yourself in your art to the public? How did you hope the audience would respond?
I think by making this work helped me to accept the operation and transplantation process while feeding my imagination as to how this operation and process could be utilized. As so often happens in my work I stumbled upon a science team working in the UK who are researching ape heart health and they came onboard immediately as did Drew Berry, a science animator who helped me create this half human/half gorilla heart.
While being incredibly personal I can still watch the work objectively (without feeling the surgeon’s knife!) I loved it when people were dancing to the rhythm of the heart beat at White Night in the early hours of the morning. This is what I wanted – for people to feel as if they were entering the cavity of my chest, feeling the pulsation of the heart.
The heart is obviously seen as the spiritual and emotional centre of the being as well as being recognised as having “memory” and by combining my heart with a gorilla’s I play on a pun with King Kong for example. The work is also a personal representation of my self awareness as a primal being.
What continues to compel you to gravitate to non human animals – specifically primates – as a source of inspiration for your work?
I see such an affinity with other primates and feel our connection as a biological whole, so it makes it easy to use the image of the ape as a metaphor or representative of what’s going on in the world around us. I like the way the image of the ape divides the viewer and confronts them with seeing aspects of themselves they may never have contemplated.
And if they don’t want to be confronted by this, I like how my work can offend them (without even doing anything to offend, if this makes sense). My works really divide the viewer with those that relate and those that really don’t like it and feel uncomfortable with it. Funny!!
Tell us how you are diversifying the sort of work you produce and have you always been entrepreneurial as an artist?
I take a really different approach to making art than many other artists. The subject matter and conceptual rational dictates the work and I chose the medium which best suits representing this idea. Most artists work aesthetically, even if they have a conceptual based practice. This working process often sees me out on my own whether in Australia or overseas which has its positives and minuses as it rarely fits in with what’s going on.
I have always worked hard and reinvested any money I make back into my practice, which allows me control of how and what I make. I don’t rely on commissions to make larger more ambitious works, though saying that the works like heart for White Night and the new Bundoora RMIT 3.5metre bronze Chimpanzee Finger http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=749qq2cqn8p01 couldn’t exit without being commissioned.
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Lisa Roet with Chimpanzee Finger at RMIT Bundoora.
