Lisa Ivory

Lisa Ivory paints small pictures in oil on panel, from postcard size to around 30 centimetres square. She works on several panels at once without preliminary sketches, starting from earth-toned underpaintings and adjusting and reworking as she goes, often drawing directly into the paint. Her liminal landscapes, part rural, part urban, part wasteland, are home to a Wildman, a skeletal Death figure, chimeras and spectres, alongside female nudes whose features are often obscured. The images draw on the Dance of Death, old-master painting and twisted fairy tales, setting the feral against the tamed, the worshipped against the abandoned and the empowered against the subjugated. In Ivory's dense, atmospheric shadowlands none of these tensions is resolved.