About
Dr Lisa Anderson works across a broad range of media creating images, video and installation that explore issues of weather and it’s consequences including the movement of peoples, animals, the shifts in mythology specific to locations, the effects of climate change in our global environment.
Lisa Anderson’s projects and international residencies explore our connection to the stewardship of the planet through histories and stories found in folklore and superstition around the world. Installations use multi-media including video/sculpture/installation to explore and engage the landscape and the built environment in dramatically changing environments pushed by geopolitics of weather and mass migration. Dr Anderson has lectured at a number of Australian and International institutions and awarded the Innovation Fellow in Architecture at UTS; The Creative Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Visiting Fellow at Tianjin University China and the Inaugural Fellow and Artist at the Australian Museum. Festivals projects include Singing up Stones, the first projection on the Sydney Opera House; Writing the City in the Brisbane Festival of Big Ideas and Sydney Writers Festival; Tiga Tiga for Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania, and Venice Bienalle Fringe Festival.
Dr Anderson has traveled often and been embedded within expedition work as an artist and photographer to bring her unique vision to the places and stories that are disappearing. Her work with the Australian Museum Collection in the 1990’s as their first Artist in Residence led to a range of engagements with histories of place through looking closely at the stories and ghosts still found in anecdote and object. The projections on the gothic structures along College St were some of the initial projection and public performance work undertaken in Sydney at such scale. This was followed by a Strategic Partner relationship with the City of Sydney to create the 3 part series Writing the City, which included skywriting, closing streets to draw on them as a special event for the Sydney Biennale, more projection work on the ABC with the University of Technology Sydney as host, while Singing up Stones was the first projection on the Sydney Opera House and included a simulcast sound work and projections on the Harbor Bridge and a cruise liner performance.
Anderson became the recipient of a number of awards, including the NSW Women and the Arts Award, the Moya Dyring Fellow in Paris, the Artist in the restage of the Norwegian Centenary expedition to the North Pole, Innovation Fellow in Architecture at UTS to develop ATTLA (snow that makes beautiful pictures as it Falls), exhibition at Customs House, Sydney, a Fellow with the Athenaeum Melbourne to create a work for the White Nights projects in Melbourne also various awards from the French Cultural Ministry, the Australia Council and the Danish Government for Arhus project, Precious, and the various residencies supported throughout the world.
Bicha Gallery in London represented Anderson work and they worked with several major exhibitions, including The Architecture Beneath Beauty, a project that included neon works and photographs bringing together diverse projects undertaken in Beijing and Iceland. Bicha also traveled the work to Festivals and Art Fairs around the world, notably the video work ICE launched the Toronto Video Tech, while Cold Dreams of Tricksters was projected on the Pennsylvanian Museum.
The ongoing projects with Lake Mungo through an invitation of the Indigenous Custodians and National Parks has resulted in major installations in London and the St Tropez Antipodean Film Festival.
Recent exhibitions include Journeys: Due North, bringing 10 years of Arctic work together at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, In The Breath of Ghosts a large-scale video/sound/sculpture installation in a disused Civic Hall and Performance centre as a commissioned event for the International Foto Biennale and Athena#3, a video and sculpture installation for White Nights, Melbourne. Residencies in both remote and city locations to explore the traces of weather and people are within the process through which Anderson creates international exhibitions and projects.
Dr Anderson is currently working on several projects, including a film project in Svalbard, Norway and creating a large-scale installation for the Biennale of Australian Art for 2018.
Highlight: Singing up Stones
This is the first ever image projection on the Sydney Opera House, 1998.I created this work with SGLM Festival and the City of Sydney while undertaking my NSW Women and the Arts Award. I had already created large scale projection in Sydney as performance works at The Australian Museum and SH Ervin Gallery. This is a signature work involving working with the site, the history of the site and those people engaged with the site from singers and dancers to builders and others. The works created by weaving my original slide transparencies with each other and creating large scale transparencies from these for the film projected.