Born on Norfolk Island, Lisa’s family soon moved to Christchurch, New Zealand and then Kallista, in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges.  Living in these mountains in the house built by her great grand parents, Lillian Williamson and artist Tom Roberts, Lisa developed a love of landscape and of making art.

After studying drawing, painting and printmaking at the National Gallery Art School (later to become the Victorian College of the Arts), Lisa became a student of Film and TV at the Swinburne Institute of Technology and has recently completed a Master of Arts degree in Animation and Interactive Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Since 1988 her art practice has involved integrating new media technologies with more traditional art media for describing her journeys, both physical and metaphorical. Lisa makes drawings, paintings, assemblages, animations and interactive works on CD-ROM.

Antarctic Impression

42 days – Pictures and Words describing an Antarctic voyage
42 digital ink jet prints made concurrently with the interactive CD-ROM 42 days – an animated Antarctic journal.

For each day of the 42 day voyage to Antarctica from January through March, 2002, I selected an image and a word that was most memorable. This was a difficult task with each day full of new experiences. The images were drawn from a journal I kept throughout the voyage, where I made drawings, notes and collected other evidences of these experiences. The words were assigned in hindsight, and then spoken and recorded. Pictures of my voice saying these words were lifted from the sound recording software and integrated with the imagery.
Collecting things in Antarctica is prohibited, except for strictly scientific purposes. These 42 prints are examples of mock Antarctic specimens I have been making since my return, to capture just some of the things I saw, experienced, thought, heard, was shown, explained and felt.
 

42 days – An animated Antarctic journal
This interactive CD-ROM was made alongside the suite of digital prints, 42 days – Pictures and Words describing an Antarctic voyage.

This animated interactive work takes the viewer on my particular journey to Antarctica – from the end of January to the start of March, 2002, through drawings, paintings, sound and video recordings made throughout the 42 days. These are woven together to describe something of the life changing experience the voyage was for me, returning from Antarctica with a new sense of what landscape could be, of what language might be used to describe it, and of what if felt like to be a mere human in this immense and changing environment.

The Australia Council’s New Media Fund supported the development of this art and other art work for exhibition, which were made after a voyage to Antarctica in 2002, with the Australian Antarctic Division’s Humanities Program.

My work is represented by Gallery 101 in Melbourne.
Website: users.bigpond.net.au/lisaroberts
Email: llisa@southcom.com.au