Welcome
Louisa Chase is a British artist-writer-researcher. In 2004, she emigrated to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and lived there for 18 years, returning to the UK in 2022 but maintaining strong links through family. She is based at the edge of the Fenlands in rural Lincolnshire, where she grew up.
Exposure to Te Ao Māori - the Māori worldview - through working in environmental conservation, through friendships, and through immersion has been central to the process of re-orientating her life and work to focus on path-finding through her native European indigenous traditions and practices. Louisa considers the idea that these have been irrevocably lost to be an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees knowledge as existing only within the human. Experience has taught her that knowledge is dispersed and diffracted; that our brains and bodies are not isolated discrete units, but part of a network of interconnected relationality. Knowledge is held not only within the individual human, but within the wider environment, land, and more-than-human others, all of whom invite listening and collaboration.
Louisa’s work begins with walking and outdoor movement practice (connected to ecosomatics), and emerges from there, often including writing, ritual, photographic recording of actions, working with handmade plant and earth paints, and more recently installation. She works intentionally with duration, cycles, and the many layers of the local.
Her work is anti-spectacle, slow, quiet, and grounded in practices of witnessing and deep listening. She incorporates research into ecological, spiritual, cultural, historical, and ancestral perspectives, questioning hierarchies and practices that have led to the multiple crises which we and the planet now face. Her research process is led by her outdoor encounters.
Louisa describes the embodied practices through which she develops her work as ancestral portals - ways of being in the world that were once essential for survival and balance - walking, working with plants as allies and medicine, reciprocity, ritual, silence, listening with land, more-than-human kin, and natural cycles. Her work re-activates exiled capacities and raises questions about materials, and about who we make art for and with, seeing art not as a commodity, but as a process of caring for all life.
Diagnosed with autism later in life, Louisa draws on her lived experience of the body-mind as a kind of sensory antenna; a fractal of the whole, tuning into the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.