Lisa Haque
Milk Teeth

Media: handmade kozo paper, gouache, transfers, embroidery, mohair
Size: 12" x 9" x 3"
$3000

Artist Statement:
I draw upon biology, botany, emblems of domesticity and their related arts to create a personal lexicon. The work is my attempt to map out my relationship to the natural world, the result is intended to be a compelling mystery rather than a linear narrative. Having worked as a professional papermaker for seven years, I developed an understanding of the material’s capacity for expression, and often push it to the edge of existence- using it’s ephemeral nature to evoke a sense of suspended time. The material also serves a conceptual purpose, with so much of my imagery being derived from plants, utilizing them to create the raw material with which I work layers on another meaning. I create archival paper to document processes of growth, degradation and decay.

My recent work consists of installations, sculptures, artist books, and two dimensional works in two main fibers: cotton and kozo, a fiber most often seen in Japan, China, and Thailand. I began working a series in an all white palette a few years ago, primarily with two dimensional works. When creating ‘Milk teeth’ for an exhibition of Artist Books at the Frost Art Museum, and the sculptures and installations that followed, the white became even more important. White was bones, teeth, bleached coral, the blank slate of the life growing inside me, and color of the deteriorating spine of a beloved and disappearing family member. The white in ‘Milk Teeth’ is the pages, the paintings, and the knit mohair shroud that envelops it, its open weave unable to seal off the tiny book from the elements entirely, but instead acting as a nest for it to rest upon. ‘Accumulation’ began as a small wall piece, and gradually expanded to become an installation of barnacle/paper wasp nest/teeth like forms that grows, evolves, and breaks as it spreads across the walls it occupies.

I channel my fear and hope into my works. They have been called quiet and meditative; perhaps making small places to rest is their purpose. As the sea levels rise, we are terrified by dire warnings of extinctions of a million species, and the direct threats to South Florida become ever more common, I continue to work in this beautiful place. Florida: the land of flowers, escape, outcasts, and fecund landscapes. I make work suspending some moment between growth and decay and as a way of forcing myself to remain in the present.

Biography

Lisa Haque is an artist living and working in Miami, Florida. She has worked with paper and books for many years, including seven spent as a professional papermaker and collaborator at two studios in the New York area. At Dieu Donné in Manhattan, she was a Studio Collaborator and the Production Manager, working with artists in residence to create new bodies of work in handmade paper, teaching classes in papermaking, and creating custom paper for artists. Prior to that, she was a papermaker and bookbinder at Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University, where she collaborated with renowned artists including Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle to produce editioned artist books and works in handmade paper.

She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago and has taught papermaking, printing, and book arts for Rutgers University, the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy, and many institutions around the U.S. Her work has been shown at the Hudson Guild Gallery and the International Print Center in New York; Fabriano, Italy, and the Moriki Paper and Ozu Waski/Oji Paper Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Her artists books are housed at the University of Miami, Special Collections, and the Newark Public Library. She is on the Board of Directors for Hand Papermaking Magazine.

http://lisahaque.com/