Welcome
Louisa Chase is a British artist and ecosomatic researcher. She emigrated to Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2004 and lived there for 18 years, returning to the UK in 2022. She is currently based in rural Lincolnshire in the Fenlands, close to where she grew up.
Working across disciplines including walking, writing, ritual, movement, photography, foraging for natural materials and working with handmade plant and earth paints, she works intentionally with duration, cycles, and the many layers of the local.
Her work is anti-spectacle, slow, quiet, and draws on practices of witnessing and deep listening. She carries out embodied inquiry through what she terms 'ancestral portals to knowing' - ways of being in the world that were once essential for survival and balance - walking, working with plants as allies and medicine, silence, pause, listening with land, more-than-human kin, and natural cycles. In the process, she raises questions about who we make art for, questions hierarchies, and collaborates with multispecies others.
She foregrounds the knowledge of experts-through-experience and the intelligences of the more-than-human, and her practice draws strongly from land connection practices taught to her in Aotearoa both from remnants of European indigenous knowledge and Rongoā Māori perspectives.
Diagnosed with autism later in life, Louisa experiences the body-mind as a subtle receiver, a kind of antenna and fractal of the whole, picking up the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.
She lives, works and creates in a seasonal and cyclic way and sees no separation between creative practice and life.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
25th October 2024 to 25th January 2025
HARI. 25 Francis Street, Hull.
Part of an exhibition and series of talks and events which shares the work of 25 artists who each completed a 25-hour residency at HARI's new space in an abandoned post-war building. My work is titled Encountering Space, and includes photographic work documenting my residency and the 10-mile journey on-foot to get there, writing, a movement score and participation in talks and events.
Past events, workshops and collaborations are listed in CV.
Libations was a walking art piece made on 30 consecutive days between 12th July and 10th August 2024. It has been shortlisted for the Marŝarto awards for walking art. The winners will be announced in January 2025.
Click on the image above to read my essay about this piece of work published on the walk-listen-create website, and click here to view a slow sequence of black and white photographic images which were the main documentation of the work. Original dialect as recorded by Marie Balfour has been used in the documentation.
The piece involved making a contract with the land and multi-species inhabitants to pour water as an offering every day for 30-days. Each day I waited until I heard the call to walk and then walked until the libation site made itself known to me.
The project is grounded in an old ritual, documented in the story of ‘Tiddy Mun’ which was collected from oral tradition in the village where I live – Redbourne, North Lincolnshire between 1887 and 1889 by Marie Balfour, and published in Folk-Lore magazine in 1891.
Documentation was through black and white photographs, and includes images of ancient ancestral sites where the libations were poured as well as modern-day agribusiness water extraction, all encountered during the course of the project.
Writing
Summer 2024
Published article in Wort Journal
In Collaboration with Woad: An Artist's Year of Listening with Isatis tinctoria.
Article on working closely with woad in my eco-somatic art practice over the space of a year; historical, sociocultural and ecological researches and embodied explorations with/in the liminal terrain of the Fens.