Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
*Blue in the Face* is an ongoing series of mixed-media collages exploring the ways women’s voices have been heard, ignored, remembered, and reclaimed. Each work focuses on a different arena—labor, voting rights, citizenship, science, art, or social justice—bringing together a small sisterhood of women whose lives reveal both hard-won progress and the work that remains. Rather than serving as an exhaustive roll call, each piece is a collage of resonance, honoring a lineage far larger than any single artwork can hold. Portraits are layered over books, legislation, constitutional text, speeches, and other historical documents that become both material and metaphor, suggesting that history itself is layered, contested, and continually rewritten. The series title refers to the expression “blue in the face”: to continue speaking despite exhaustion or resistance. Through portraiture, collage, and layered text, these works honor women who have persisted in claiming voice, dignity, and agency.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lisa M. LeMair is a multidisciplinary artist based on North Carolina’s Outer Banks whose practice spans printmaking, collage, installation, sculpture, and wearable art. Rooted in a lifelong impulse to make, she investigates the relationship between making and meaning, exploring how materials, language, and process carry, obscure, and transform stories. Moving fluidly between paper, fiber, metal, textiles, and print, she builds layered works in which material boundaries dissolve and unexpected connections emerge. Her work explores place, identity, belonging, women’s histories, and environmental change, using layering, seams, and fragmentation to suggest histories that are simultaneously revealed and concealed. Whether encountered on the body or in space, her work invites close attention, emphasizing process as a site where meaning is continually constructed, questioned, and reimagined.
© Lisa LeMair