Artists

Lisa Stewart

I am an artist and a teacher; part of my work is to facilitate art and ceramic programs for students with mental health challenges. I also have experience of teaching students with special needs. One of the main reasons that I find my work so rewarding is that I am exposed to unusual, often intense and interesting people. I believe that by encouraging these people to use free creative pursuit as a vehicle with which to respond to often difficult and challenging life experience, that I can aid progressive development in many ways and on many levels.
Ways of being, seeing and doing that are to do with deep awareness of self, the strengthening of the core positive elements of humanity, a journey that explores the very nature of being The interactive projects that I run are deliberately aimed at integrating people back into society and encouraging them to lose their anxiety and fear by providing a safe yet high stimulus experimental environment.

My own artwork is a celebration of difference, naturally inspired by my interest in and contact with those extraordinary people that are viewed as outsiders to our culture and society.

I continue to enjoy the infinite possibilities of slip cast and hand built assemblage and manipulation of clay. I would describe my work as figurative, perversely humorous, sociologically / psychologically challenging, Gothic surreal, and extreme.

My Art practice is perhaps influenced by the cold clinical fact that my mother spent many years in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950’s, a not too distant time when it seems that mental illness was misinterpreted, misunderstood and hidden from view. Fortunately a lot of progress has been made and patients (in/out) are actively encouraged to explore creativity as a means of self-expression.

I also teach Ceramics as an outreach pilot project connected to Longreach House Psychiatric unit, Redruth, the work produced tending toward the raw and emotive, evocative of trauma and sadness but always with connection to the joy of the human spirit, triumphant and enduring. Work that universally cries out for the viewer to respond.