Artist 265
Louise Richardson
The Ethereal forgotten
Mixed media
Louise Richardson is a British fine artist who specializes in mixed media works that combine natural found objects transforming them into ethereal garments. She Lives and works in Norwich, England.
Her ethereal artworks are formed from many mediums, making shoes, clothes, butterflies, books, fiber art, and paper works to create a dream-like world with her art. She uses materials that tend to be natural, elemental or found objects, they come with their own stories or inspire new ones.
The clothes are often unwearable, physically too small, fragile or heavy, with materials ranging from nails, shed snake skins, dandelion clocks, razors shells, cobwebs and thorns.
Often the objects and images are frail and transient, but by reinventing, combining, observing and retelling their tales gives them a new sense of life, place, preservation and resilience.
Sophia Schwan describes how through this process Louise weaves a tapestry of mystical, feminine and dream-like reality, working with a fascinating range of materials, often discarded and elemental ones, such as rusty nails, dusty photographs or shed snakeskin, to name a few.
Her fragile pieces invite us to question our view on the meaning and beauty of discarded everyday objects that we have no use for anymore.
The clothing pieces she constructs are not wearable. They are “unconsumable” other than through our senses, thus rendering their existence far from a disposable commodity.
Louise uses heavy materials, especially lead which features in a lot of her work. “I think there is a strange magical quality about lead because it has its own history. If you are dealing with lead over a period of days it scratches and gets marked. I love the weight of it. It's amazing because even though it is heavy, it is like fabric, so you can stitch it. I began to print images into the lead and use lead alongside more delicate materials so you get this amazing sort of alchemy going on,” she says.
Richardson of her work describes, “I am currently looking at the idea of memory and identity, bringing universal messages to the viewer, through the portrayal of objects in my own memory.
The idea of telling stories is very important to me, taking everyday objects and creating tales. Within art, anything is possible: scale, materiality and time don’t matter, and animals and humans coexist on the same level. The diversity of materials within my work, both found and processed, give me the opportunity and freedom to invent metaphors, which run parallel with the subject matter.”
Sources Consulted
https://www.artandsciencejournal.com/post/69814254818/fashion-and-nature-louise-richardson-art-and/amp
https://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/views/real-life-meet-the-alternative-artist-1-489063
http://www.louiserichardsonartist.com/
https://www.thelissome.com/blog/2019/1/23/louise-richardson-sustainable-fashion-editorial
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