Since January this year I have been studying full-time to complete the Advanced Diploma in Art and Creativity (Level 7) with The Learning Connexion.
It has come with the challenge of changing country part way through, but being back on home land which my cells seem to instinctively recognise, has been a rich and catalytic time.
This year has seen the publication of an article about my journey with the colour blue online by The Dark Mountain Project and I was selected as Featured Artist of the Month for October by Art.Earth. I am currently preparing for the end of year exhibition.
I will be showing a few pieces of work at the TLC gallery in Taita, along with some of my colleagues from the course (Darnia is exhibiting at her studio). There will be a special opening ceremony at 4pm on Thursday 8th December, coinciding with the full moon.
At the same time I have a growing curiosity about what it means to show work and the significance of how we choose to do that. This has led me to conduct a bit of an experiment as part of my end of year "exhibition". For 3 days, running concurrently with the show in Taitā, I am opening my rented home/studio in Lincoln, UK to those who would like to come and see my work in situ, and by "work" I mean life!
Visitors will have the opportunity to share in some of the daily rituals which are part of my practice: settling down to watch the fading of the light at dusk, making and sharing plantain tea, resting, listening with the whole body, as well as experiencing paintings, body prints, writing and found-object pieces.
It will be an informal and exploratory event, and I guess has its roots in "Open Studios". I hope it will be a space for creative sharing that is intimate, personal, hands-on (items can be touched, picked up, handled), and integrated with how and why I work the way I do.
If you would like details please email me and I will send the address and times: louisachase@gmail.com.
Louisa Chase is a British ecological artist who has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for eighteen years and is currently spending a period of time back in Lincolnshire, England, where she grew up.
Working across practices including movement, massage, ceremony and ritual, nature immersion, writing, walking, photographic recording, hand making of natural paints, natural printmaking, and video, she explores in a physical and visceral way how we can make more space to experience the oft-forgotten truth of our reciprocal responsive relationship with all of life.
Her work embraces tension and paradox; transience and certainty, movement and stillness, structure and fluidity, repulsion and rapture, doing and being, darkness and light.
She experiences the body-mind as a subtle receiver, a kind of antenna and fractal of the whole, picking up the visible and invisible, capable of listening on the wild edges of awareness to all kin, and to stories of place.
She lives, works and creates in a spontaneous way in response to this listening, and sees no separation between creative practice and life.
