ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an interdisciplinary artist, primarily working in drawing, sculpture, video, audio, and text pieces. Past bodies of work look at ideas around usefulness, value, and perception. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 and subsequently going through intensive treatment, I have become particularly interested in ideas around the building of hopes and dreams, illness, limits of the body, loss, and isolation. In my current project, Poison Cut Burn, I have begun trying to untangle what this experience means.
I am thinking more deeply about the source of my own expectations for my life, what is passed down generationally or absorbed through social interactions. I turned to childhood and lineage to try to understand where my hopes for my life came from and how they have been reinforced. A childhood dollhouse with all of the complicated connections to feminine aspirations and problematic symbolism is one axis of this project. My own body is another axis. Homes of various scales, inadequate protecting forms, appear again and again, isolated, embedded, partially hidden.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lilly Handley is an interdisciplinary artist based in Madison, Wisconsin. She received her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design and her BFA from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Handley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In her work, she uses sculpture, images, sound, video, drawing, and physical computing to look at value, perception, identity and loss. Handley’s work has been shown in exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
Select exhibitions include the 2025 Game Show at the Vestibule Gallery in Seattle, 2021 White Columns registry juried show, White Columns Online: GMT, curated by Sahal Hassan and Well Now WTF, an online exhibition curated by Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, & Wade Wallerstein. Her work was also included in reCONNECTION at the Roberts Gallery in the Lunder Arts Center at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Handley is a contributing artist to Ways of Something (Episode 4), curated by Lorna Mills, which was included in Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905 – 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has screened in other venues, such as The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA.
© Lilly Handley