NAOMI LISIKI
2020 - 2021
Naomi Lisiki is a visual artist born and raised on the Caribbean Island Guadeloupe. She received her B.F.A. from The Cooper Union and her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.
Lisiki engages with different ways of creating, such as oil painting, sculpture and writing. Dealing with themes of permutation and metamorphosis, her recent work involves the installation of sculptural objects, paintings and research writing that are expressive of the human condition. English being her second language and inspired by philosophy and logistics, she has created a system of notation that is meant to explore and comprehend the passage of time in relation to our emotions. Working with language, she engages with the notion that language sometimes fails to express the essence of things. Her systematic notation consists of understanding, through a language that is personal and symbolic, reasons of being and the essence of life. Similar to poetry, the writing components of her work are meant to merge a poetic perspective of the world with theoretical and mathematical understandings, to somehow represent “the logic of life that is beyond logic.”
Her paintings, mostly abstract, apply densely packed marks in vaguely symmetrical patterns. Both expressive and repetitive, they are meant to be markers of time and of sensorial experiences. It is important for her to write her research by her painting and sculptural work, as the work does not have any “final form” but is meant to be in constant growth and change.
WORK
“What I aim to do is to find a way to express the inherent qualities of life that language cannot encapsulate.”
“What I aim to do is to find a way to express the inherent qualities of life that language cannot encapsulate. I use writing as a sculptural form of expression. To me words are as tangible as a seashell and as profound as the sea. As an effort to produce an archive of my own being in the world,
I engage with materials that had an emotional but also spatial impact in my life. As a result, the things that I create become part of a collection of dialogues and archived sensorial and personal experiences.”
- Naomi Lisiki
