Dr Lisa Metherell is an artist and senior lecturer in Art and Design at Birmingham City University. She co-leads the Art Activisms Research Cluster. She is also an adoptive parent.
Her practice research is concerned with the challenges of caring well in difficult times, unspeakability and the limitations of language for marginalised subjects and how art has the potential to create representational complexity to resist normative and reductive categorisations. Her focus has been on queer identities and more recently on families with lived experience of trauma.
Her art changed after she became a mother and the materials she was used to working with no longer reflected her creative concerns and needs. Having trained and worked in the past as a carpenter, she returned to using wood. Now, with wood; a material imbued with narratives of nature, strength and solidity as well as disease and climate collapse; she is developing a material vocabulary that can express overwhelm, trauma and unspeakability within the context of failing care systems for care experienced young people and their families.
Contact: LDMetherell@gmail.com