Lisa Hooper SWLA

Statement

I work with a variety of print media. What attracts me to printmaking is the surface quality of the finished prints and the intervention of a craft process between the concept and the image.

I also enjoy the process of abstraction which printmaking demands: there is a tendency to pare my subjects down to their essence which I believe is rooted in the deliberate and technical design process of printmaking itself.

Much of my work is inspired by the natural world and in it, I am attempting to communicate what I see and feel about it. Sometimes this is what I can only describe as the character or essence of a particular bird or species.  At other times it might be an attempt to capture pattern or form.

What drives me to produce it is personal exposure to the natural world and my love for it, in the face of the many man-made challenges it faces, combined with my own personal inclination to create images. My ambition, therefore, is to produce images that are recognisable, decorative and resonant.  I want people to connect with the observation that I have made about my subject and to empathise with it.

Bio

Lisa was born in Hampshire and has lived in northeast Essex, mid-Wales, Gloucestershire and, since 2005, in Dumfries and Galloway.

In 1992 she joined an evening class in etching at what is now the University of Gloucestershire and became fascinated by printmaking. Over successive years her commitment grew and in 1998 she bought her own press and started working from her basement studio in Cheltenham.

Lisa began to sell her work first locally and then further afield. Redundancy from the Countryside Commission in June 2005 enabled her to relocate to south-west Scotland in order to pursue a new career as a full-time artist.

Her work is varied both in terms of technique and subject matter but her passion for landscape and natural history, particularly birds, is evident in much of her work. She makes linocuts, woodcuts, collagraphs, etchings, monotypes, and Japanese woodblock prints as well as working in some mixed and hybrid print media. 

The purchase of a Columbian press in 2015 enabled her to produce multiblock and reduction linocuts more accurately and this is reflected in her recent work. Lisa is fascinated by the interaction between machines and the artist, having owned two presses each of which profoundly influenced her work.

Lisa is a member of the Dumfries and Galloway Fine Arts Society and exhibits widely within and beyond the region in a number of commercial galleries throughout the UK. Lisa won several prizes from the National Exhibition of Wildlife Art and from the 2015 David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year Exhibition. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Scottish Ornithologists' Club in Aberlady, at WWT reserves Caerlaverock and Martin Mere and at the Maclaurin Gallery in Ayr.

She has had three residencies at Nature in Art and one at the East Neuk Music Festival and is a regular contributor to the Society of Wildlife Artists' (SWLA) annual open exhibition, The Natural Eye, at Mall Galleries. In 2019 she was elected an Associate Member of the SWLA followed by full (and Council) membership in 2021 and 2024 respectively.

Langford Press published two books by Lisa, First Impressions in 2014 and Printing Wildlife in 2016 and her work was featured in other books in its Wildlife Art series. She has also contributed to several themed compilation books showcasing printmaking, published by Mascot Media and has a portfolio of greetings cards with Art Angels.