Lisa Wilson Palmour is a self-taught artist who works in cultural history and digital archiving. She’s a long time resident of Vancouver (uninvited guest) but was born and raised in Alberta’s Treaty 7 territory. She has Ukrainian/Scottish heritage, and was brought up in a Ukrainian-Canadian family deeply connected to traditional lifeways. This upbringing taught her about DIY culture & homesteading while giving her a love for the prairies. In 2011 Lisa became a folklorist through her master’s thesis on textile handicrafts made in outport Newfoundland.
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For my art practice I use mixed-media collage to interpret omnipresent societal themes and issues. As a dyslexic middle-aged parent, who is a punk, a radical, an occultist and a tomboy, I intentionally layer pieces of myself into my work. Significant influences and inspirations include: Hannah Hoch, George Littlechild, Toshiko Okanoue, Maria Prymachenko, Romare Bearden, Jesse Treece, & Consuelo Gonzalez Amezcua.
Thank you to Hammock for having me and to past participants for leading the way!
Archival Projections
Archival Projections is an anti-aesthetic mixed-media collage project by @lisawilly that addresses omnipresent societal themes such as aging, fear, self-worth, home, housing, ancestry, patriarchy, consumerism, underground culture and nonconformity. Collages were made using personal photo collections, public domain images and children’s drawings set next to stream-of-conscious texts to create a kind of auto-ethnography.
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2/28, Dwellings of Yore, mixed media collage, 2023.
cw: housing injustice
I like this collage because I’ve always been drawn to the look of a ramshackle abode…a falling hut, shack, a cabin of weathered wood. A dwelling that people once swept out and kept warm, now shifting on hinges, waiting to sink completely. Other people find it, use it for shelter, maybe move in and re-build, making a new home from a broken shell. My feelings are connected to my fascination with abandoned spaces in general, and with hermits, with living off-grid, or away from society out of necessity or birthright. Maybe there is something juvenile about this attraction — the thrill of a child escaping upwards into a tree fort.
But when I was making this piece I was thinking about something different….something more political, and urgent. About how housing as a human right is a utopian dream… and nothing more. But why should it be this way? How has the ruling class managed to normalize this crime against humanity? How have we let this happen? I will never understand this unjust system we have proliferated. Housing for all! — is a major theme in this body of work, because it is a major theme in my life and the lives of so many.
3/28, Ringing Bells of Friendship, mixed media collage, 2022.
I recently sent this collage to a friend but took a photo of it first. It’s meant to represent how certain threads of knowing one another can tie us together for a long time. Having a history with someone, even if paths diverge, can be a a tangible, irreversible thing. Sometimes I wonder if we know the people we know due to some master plan from the universe. Will we know each other in our next lives too? Or in the spirit realm? What are the threads of spirit I’ve given to my chosen people along the way? Do they even matter when everything ends?
Reverberating… conversations and laughs, like dripping sounds echoing forever through cement pipelines, a constant rain pelting on wood shingles, a brass bell ringing into future hang-outs. Even when I’m absent, and busy being a parent, or completely gone for good, what I leave behind, I hope, is something that could make an old friend smile.
4/28, Era of the Doom Scroll, mixed media collage, 2022.
For the first time in this series, I’ve included a visual representation of myself. [When I appear in my work, I’m often a medieval or Victorian illustration.] I stand to the left, in a pink dress. I’m rigid and fearful here…and so this is the theme: fear. I find myself in a state of attraction/repulsion towards fear-inducing things. Maybe this is true for everyone? Is this why we are now in the era of the doom scroll? Wherein our screens spin images & stories that feed us a feast of morbid fascination. The bad-news cycle. I don’t know what will happen over the next 20-30 years when fresh eyes are increasingly slammed with doom — like an endless Faces of Death viewing party. Fear is something instinctive and something we all should respect and find ways to interact with… but why exactly are we fed the doom scroll? There must be a reason and that reason is probably: $.
I grew up watching horror films. I have so many good memories of being an 80s kid and renting scary movies from the local shops. Just for fun, here’s a list of some of my favourites: 1. Night of the Hunter 2. Psycho 3. The Birds 4. The Omen 5. Close Encounters 6. Suspiria (Argento) 7. House (Hausu) 8. Pet Cemetery 9. The Changeling 10. Jacob’s Ladder 11. Videodrome 12. Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors 13. Poltergeist 14. The Exorcist, and of course 15. The Shining.
Yes, I love the classics. Don’t you?
5/28, Spirit Communication, mixed-media collage, 2023. cw: departed loved ones
Nothing has made me feel more capable of connecting to the other side than having a young child. They say children’s minds are kept really wide open, like massive bright pools, absorbent, and with radar. Without saying much about her private realm, I just want to say that this seems to be true for her. She lives firmly in our world, but with odd abilities and tendencies. These are connected to names, places, smells, dreams, thoughts and queries. They all hint at a deeper understanding of something we don’t really understand. But then I have to question my own biases and hopes. And I think maybe everything has to be a mystery for a reason! 🙃
This collage is a visual representation of my own spirit communications. My ancestors and relations are floating there — the people who guide quietly from the beyond. Pictured are two generations of the Buk family, my maternal line, …men standing next to the matriarchs, all of whom are keeping watch. The symbolism is evident in this work, my expression clear, my meaning full of hopeful mysteriousness.
6/28 Tastemakers Be Gone!, mixed media collage, 2023.
This piece is political in a few different ways. On the surface, it’s about my understanding of taste and aesthetics — or my misunderstanding of these things… or my disinterest. I’m particularly put off by the tendency towards minimalism in contemporary art. Not that I don’t like minimal art. I don’t like how it is labelled acceptable while other styles are pushed aside and deemed tacky or inherently bad. Just think of what brilliance is excluded by the parameters of minimalism. I put this one piece together to push on back and say Tastemakers, Be Gone!.
On a deeper level, this collage is my version of a political poster. I won’t say exactly what my politics are here, or what I am protesting, but I will say that while making it I was thinking about how history is packaged for us in very constrictive, inaccurate ways. And how there is an ever-present societal pressure to accept narratives that are told to us by the ruling class. These pressures are entangled in our educations. And how do we break free and find new ways of knowing? Let’s forge a way! In the meantime, we can still make art if we want to… weird, cluttered, bright, strange art. And still find honest, dynamic histories to tell. We just have to reach deep and purposefully, always looking in different directions.
7/28, Mind Clutter of Epic Proportions, mixed-media collage, 2022.
I present now my first post about aging and about being a middle-aged parent. I have a lot of mixed emotions about this age, and the impending ones. I’m 44 this year. Double that, and this is the number I hope to reach. Therefore I am exactly ½ way through this walk. Are we supposed to stop and reflect right about now? I don’t know. But I do live with a nagging feeling that I’m doing something wrong by aging… especially with a toddler. How is this possible? You tell me! Something or other to do with patriarchy? While sitting and aging, as we are all doing at all points of all days, I have many questions. Is it not a great privilege to age? Is there nothing more normal? Is not my life experience (as an ‘older’ parent) not a great benefit to my child? Can we not just call it the natural and necessary consumption of years? I try to not get too philosophical about aging, or take it personally. I try to let the mind clutter go. To not have unreasonable ideas about what it looks like on me, or how it will feel in my body. I just want to break the cycle of age shaming, because dammit, can we not all grow old and wise in peace, please?
Mushroom imagery can be seen in many of my collages. They symbolize the earth, birth, growth, beauty, nourishment. There is a visible connection to birth in this piece, …and bringing forward the next generation. Birth, growth, age, it’s meant to be beautiful. This is what I’m hoping to put forward.
8/28, Ode to a Misfit, mixed-media collage, 2022.
This is my tribute to the outsiders. When I was making it, I felt that it was about as close to my personal style as I can come. I could feel the misfit-ness oozing off of it. (It’s also a shout-out to one of my favourite films!) When reflecting on misfits (and outsider culture more broadly), I go through a process of comparing what the misfit person represents compared to what the normative person represents. Why does this gulf exist and why does it even matter? What are the norms and ideals of a particular society or culture, and how are they reinforced? Anyone who doesn’t understand these norms, or care to follow them, can slide outside the lines of acceptance.
The process of watching someone fall outside, or be pushed, can be painful. We’ve all seen it happen, and many people I know have experienced it. But what I also know is that some people really soar above us, as outsiders. They make the art I want to see, write the books I want to read, direct the films I want to watch, and do things in wildly imaginative ways. I just wrote a long cliche paragraph in my head about how I pushed against the mainstream as a young person and eventually found my interests and influences. I won’t write down my trajectory of the associated cliches. I will say this: certain misfits really made my life better. Can we not all agree that it takes some strength and awesomeness to exist on the fringe? Hence my tribute to them, wherever they are, whoever they are.
9/28, Weirdness, Solemnity and Vastness, mixed-media collage, 2023.
This a pretty large collage at 18 in x 24 in. (four collages from this series are this same size). It’s a personal favourite… about the stuff of the world, of the universe, that makes everything so big and strange and hard to grasp. The great mystery of why we are here, and how…with such profound beauty and diversity.
And the complexities of being a person in this world of nations, but not really caring for nationhood or borders. Through this work, let me hint at these things, and not go down the rabbit hole. Let me just say we are all just here on this amazing planet for some reason, and that is cause for reflection and celebration every day.
10/28, The Inside of Love, mixed-media collage, 2023.
And this one is all about the kind man I am lucky enough to live my life with. A representation of him can be seen next to a large pink rose. I photographed it just the other day, at the height of its blooming. It smelled like lemonade! And then on the same day I found this likeness of Jake in the archives and suddenly got inspired to whip this together. Jake’s father can be seen at the top of the collage, holding one of the paintings he made. His father died just 11 months before our child was born, so we think of his soul as a kind of guiding light.
I originally wanted this whole series to be auto-ethnographic but I am finding it much harder to write out the stories of my life. So I will just leave it as musings, introspections, bit and pieces. That is all!
1/28, Everyday Feels Backwards, mixed-media collage, 2023.
This one is not pretty and it’s not meant to be. It’s a piece about confusion. Confusion is a daily experience for me as I walk through life with dyslexia (it’s somewhat mild and very few people know this about me!). I’ve been made fun of many times because I’ve messed something up that others find simple. I approach the world and my career with a fake-it-till-you-make-it vibe, but wow, sometimes I don’t know where I am in the world. I walk the opposite direction on impulse, I start projects from upside down and backwards (slowly correcting myself), and my experience of numbers is absurd. I internalize my confusion and practice things on the down-low (practicing really helps me) so people don’t notice. I am high functioning and with focus and repetition, I do most things quite well. Just please don’t ever give me a map or test my vocabulary or give me a long list of directions to follow..or.. well, so many things.🤪
12/28, Letter Writing as Ethnography, paper assemblage, 2023.
This post is a bit different. It isn’t a collage, but instead I made a temporary assemblage of paper items from my personal collection. I wanted to do a piece on my practice of collecting postcards and stamps, as well as my longtime hobby of letter writing. I once thought the only way anyone could really understand the trajectory of my life would be through the letters and emails I’ve sent. The problem is that since having a child, I’ve stopped writing letters. And i no longer write emails either (who has time for that!) But the point is … correspondence has given me a lot of pleasure and purpose in my life. I am grateful to all the friends who have kept in touch with me over the years.
This work is a completely random compilation taken from a pile of ephemera I keep in a suitcase. I love the Ukrainian postcard as my grandparents brought it back after a trip from the homeland in the 1970s.
13/28, Free Fall into Parenthood, mixed-media collage, 2023.
The subject I’m presenting here is a bit obvious. This is me hoping to show the emotional energy connected to having a child… or free falling into the experience. For me it has felt a lot like falling down a steep mountain and landing into a pool of constant (relentless?) caregiving… 😚🫠. But there are always silver linings. One amazing thing is that our daughter is an incredible little person with a natural drive towards creativity. She has been a major contributor to this project, working alongside me nightly, making her own collages and drawings. Most of the collages I’m showing have her drawings all throughout. Sometimes they are so important to my vision that I use them as a foundation, showing me a way forward. Talk about a metaphor.
14/28, Stars Above the Great Forest, mixed-media collage, 2023.
People who believe in magic are way more interesting to me than people who do not. Don’t get me wrong — I can by hyper-literal and cynical about things. I can even get carried away with trying to determine what is factual/truthful versus what is mere fantasy. Often this doesn’t prove fruitful. But finally, at my middle-aged age, I can say that I do believe in magic … or something along those lines. Or, I believe in mystery, that’s maybe more accurate. My sister is pictured here having a nap. She is a believer in magic. And our great-grandparents, I never knew them, but I am sure they did too. I’d like to think that everyone does as we go deeper into age.
15/28, Flight of the Spirits, mixed media collage, 2022.
Flying upwards and over. Entering a space, a vacuum, a vehicle, going forward, leaving it. Vacating. Living, dying. These are the bodily notions & motions I was thinking about. How everything is moving all the time, even when we are perfectly still. Standing back to watch it all. Flight of the spirits. Projections everywhere.
16/28, Legend Tripping, mixed-media collage, 2023.
There is this really fascinating area of study within Folklore that focuses on studying people who get really into local legends. They go on exciting little excursions / trips to see if they can verify any truth to legendary stories. Often these trips involve cemeteries, abandoned buildings, old bridges — anywhere with spooky tales attached. I was thinking about belief and legend trippers when I was making this one. I have lots of good thoughts about this kind of fieldwork. But it also occurs to me that organized religion is a kind of legend trip. Or maybe it’s THE legend trip. While I’ve obviously outed myself as a spiritual-occultist type of person, I’m indifferent to organized religion. I don’t want to put anyone off or offend people… but… why?! Why follow this archaic fantasy? It’s appears to be all about oppression, manipulation, control, judgement and condemnation. I liken it to consumerism under corporate control, and I’ve put references to that in my collage. Anyway, I prefer the kind of belief that get us up in the middle of the night with a flashlight to chase down a story about a mythical animal living in the woods. Or to look up at the moon and make a wish. Or watch waves crashing on the shore. And just generally being a good person who cares about other people.
17/28, Invisibility Cloak in Stereograph, mixed-media collage, 2023.
From the start of this project I wanted to do something on invisibility. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but we all know what it feels like to not be seen. I’m here in double image, in stereo, in stereograph. And so this one is about the way we all feel invisible sometimes, even when we are so present it is almost like there are two of us. I also hint at the invisibility that many women experience, especially as they age. The photo was taken at the height of my youth in adulthood, with big feelings, but feeling see-through. Do we ever stop feeling see-through?
I like to ask questions. Such as this one: where did I even come from? I can’t go back far in the genealogical record due to the incredible upheaval of relocation that occurred on both sides of my family. But in the top corner you will see the mud domicile of the Ukrainian settlers in Alberta. This represents my homeland (or a version of it), and all the good and bad things that sprung from these relocations onto the prairies. A mix of dirt and water. To be visible and invisible. To steal and to give. To speak and be heard, to speak and not be heard. The feeling of stereo silence and not ever having a real place to be perfectly at home.
18/28, City Scavengers, mixed-media collage, 2023.
A found-photo-collage. When I was living in Montreal between early-2004 and late-2009 I used to walk around looking through piles of trash left on curbs and in alleys. People who do this know you can find real gems. Such gems get saved from the landfill and end up in people’s apartments — furniture, home decor, records, books, curiosities, and my personal favourite, old photos and albums. On several occasions, I pulled people’s antique family photos out of the garbage. I kept them in a box with other bits of ephemera like postcards and letters. Over time, and after several moves, I wondered what the use in keeping other people’s photos was. Aesthetically I know I like old photos, historically they are interesting as an oddly specific moment in time, and interpersonally they are voyeuristic in a fairly low key way. But still, it feels like now is the time to let them go. As a final farewell, here’s a collage featuring a selection of found photos tucked haphazardly into a messy background created by my 3 year old child. Old moments in time becoming trapped in a new oddly specific moment in time. Btw, the mascot is not a found photo. I just like putting mascots in random places.
19/28, The Idea of West, mixed-media collage, 2023.
cw: ongoing impacts of colonialism
Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North (1967) radio program was highly influential on me as a teenager. I listened to it on the radio late at night. It was a sound collage and a documentary, pointing to a clash of cultures and ideas. Also a breaking of stereotypes. I have always been steered by the surreal nature of this work, and its simultaneous depth of reality and awareness.
This collage is a visual representation of how I would create a similar audio collage on The Idea of West. What it was to me as a child, versus what that idea has become as a longtime visitor of the west coast. Stereotypes built and shattered, lingering colonial hostility (neo-colonialism), mud slinging, fire burning, loss of house/home across the board, and at the centre, political corruption and a darkly misguided police force. All of this on top of rich & dynamic cultural diversity, amazing vistas, bodies of water, trees for miles. My Idea of West piece is the incessant sound of birdsong over top the clanging of film reels — generational, economical, & cultural earthquakes, written all over the surface.
20/28, Art Bell and the Expansion of Minds, mixed-media collage, 2022.
Keeping in line with the topic of late night radio, here is another piece connected to the great impact radio had on me as a young person. Pre-internet, this was the way for me to get transmissions from the underground. We had a short-wave radio at home, and could listen to music and voices from the other side of the globe. But you didn’t even need shortwave to listen to Coast-to-Coast AM, you just had to stay up really late. And persist even later, to hear the best parts.
Art Bell’s voice is etched into many of my memories. Trying so hard to not fall asleep. He was the voice behind all of the topics I was really curious about. Mysteries of the unexplained. Paranormal stories. Alien abduction. Myths & Legends. Originally this piece was called Mel’s Hole, because this was one of my favourite episodes that became an ongoing mystery on the show. Now the episodes themselves are the stuff of legend.
21/28, The Opposite of Void, mixed-media collage, 2023.
Where there is a weeping willow, you will find me sitting happily. Earlier in this project, I reflected on how my partner told me of his yearning for the sound of wind shaking poplar leaves. I agreed with him. Nothing is more serene than this sound, especially if you are hearing it while lying down, eyes closed. If you are lucky you are on the prairies with a window wide open, a breeze hitting the metal window screen. If you are even more lucky, there will be a distant sound of thunder.
At its heart, there is a tree, taken in black and white, right at the centre of this collage. Its heartbeat. My grandfather took this photo many moons ago, of the birds at the top of this tree. The tree is long gone now, but its place in the front yard is still marked by a circle of stones and terracotta blocks. A place that has no tree in the circle, but is the opposite of void.
22/28, Children of the Sunrise, mixed-media collage, 2022.
This one is about the colours of a sunrise, a sight I almost always miss. You can see my daughter walking up a hill, pulling herself up onto stone steps. She is in the bottom corner. Look at how sweet and adventuresome her posture is, brightness everywhere. There is no real epiphany to be explored in this obversation. It was just a moment I captured. I’m attached to the sun as a symbol, and I’m sentimental about having a child …feeling lucky to enjoy the luxurious parts of the physical world together.
My writing is now winding down for this project. I’ve expressed so much of what I had hoped to. Now I will let the last few works speak for themselves.
23/28, Archival Transmissions, mixed-media collage, 2023.
24/28 After the Solstice, mixed-media collages, 2023.
27/28, Where Nature is Sublime, mixed-media collages, 2023.
28/28, Save the First for Last, mixed-media collage, 2022.
For this project nothing makes more sense than finishing off where I started off. The idea of PROJECTING has been a major motivating concept. When I made this piece last fall I was thinking about the people in this photo — my ancestors. I was on the cusp of an overarching concept and I wanted to start by projecting them gracefully into the future through this artwork and platform. Could they even imagine appearing through such technology? Could they conceive the thought of their faces being shared digitally, for the gaze of future generations? Most likely not in their wildest dreams, and this is something that excites me.
Ths series has evolved a great deal since I started it. But I hope the works have stayed true to my desire to invert what is considered acceptable and worthy in the world of contemporary art. I feel very fortunate to have had this time and this avenue to push back and do something I’ve always wanted to do: to create a large, cohesive, & subversive body of work.
See you next time… Thank you Hammock Residency and thanks to everyone who checked out the feed and the art talk! This has been a wonderful experience and I look forward to our 2023 group exhibition and publication
Artist Quick Links
Lisa Wilson
Lisa Wilson Palmour is a self-taught artist who works in cultural history and digital archiving. She’s a long time resident of Vancouver (uninvited guest) but was born and raised in Alberta’s Treaty 7 territory. She has Ukrainian/Scottish heritage, and was brought up in a Ukrainian-Canadian family deeply connected to traditional lifeways. This upbringing taught her about DIY culture & homesteading while giving her a love for the prairies. In 2011 Lisa became a folklorist through her master’s thesis on textile handicrafts made in outport Newfoundland.
