Shelf life

Lisa West McNeice
The Long Gallery
10th of August - 3rd September 2023

PUBLIC PROGRAM - POETRY: Saturday 2nd September 11am - 12:30pm

Come and enjoy a celebration of art and poetry on the penultimate day of the show “Shelf Life”, with poetry from the artist Lisa West McNeice and collaborators Steph Amir and Isabel Robinson.

Isabel Robinson is a Melbourne writer and community development worker. Her work has been published in The Age, The Guardian and The Victorian Writer and she is currently working on a novel for middle grade readers with her husband, Stephen Sholl. She has two children and lives in St Kilda.

www.isabelrobinson.net.

Steph Amir is a statistician, parent, and emerging poet. Her poems have been published in Australia and internationally, including by Australian Poetry Journal, Burrow, Foam:e, Plumwood Mountain, StylusLit, TEXT, and others. In 2021, she was a Writer’s Victoria Writeability Fellow (a fellowship for writers with disabilities) and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Writing Awards. Steph can be found on Instagram @steph_kaymir.

The work in “Shelf Life” explores objects connected to people now gone and therefore their memory. It embraces selective clutter and kitsch; and seeks the sometimes uneasy - even embarrassing - beauty in the everyday.

In “Shelf Life”, West McNeice has foregrounded and enlarged the small, prized objects and the crafts such as crochet and lacework of her grandmother’s glass cabinet and loungeroom. She has experimented with acrylic paint, stencils and spray paint, perhaps finding a moment when ‘Granny meets Banksy’.

Storytelling, with its inevitable intertwining of language and identity, along with the energy and imagination of play, are fundamental to West McNeice’s work, and are manifested in the often riotous combinations of colour and the droll facial expressions of her subjects.

As a kid, Lisa would play with the objects depicted, conscious of intense and surreal experiences of connection. Lisa’s work reflects her understanding of the creative energy, openness and inbuilt discipline of play; and how it sets us up for the life-long reception of knowledge and understanding.

As you peruse the exhibition, hopefully you will sense the artist’s - and the viewer’s - shifting place in the concertina motion of the present and the past.

Artist bio:

Lisa completed her initial art training in the areas of life drawing, ceramics and sculpture in the vibrant Art School of Ballarat CAE in the early ‘Eighties. She loves plein-air painting and botanical illustration but is just as fascinated by the small objects on shelves that wait patiently for our attention. West McNeice left a career in secondary school teaching in 2013, when she started her own private teaching business to support and enrich her creative life. This features painting, poetry, song writing and recording projects, and a lot of daydreaming and reading. “Shelf Life” is Lisa’s eighth exhibition.

https://www.lisawestmcneiceart.com