Lisa Gipton
Artist statement

About the work:

The “Floral” series is an ongoing personal project that has been created over the past 10 years.  Lisa combines her love of gardens and plants with her artistic practice to create these unique and intriguing images.   The technique I use to create this work has an element of serendipity; you are never quite sure of what will appear on the paper, what hidden details or unexpected colours may result.

These images are created without the aid of a camera.  By placing the botanical specimen directly inside the photographic enlarger and transforms the semitransparent flower into an ‘organic negative’. 

This curious technique represents an unusual approach to the traditional medium of Botanical Illustration, allowing the artist to not only delineate the form of the flower but also the subtle internal structure of the specimen usually hidden from the eye. 

The floral specimens are collected fresh before each printing session, and therefore can be seen to reflect the season during which the images were created, in turn capturing the very essence of botanical life.

Andersch, Joerg For the love of Paris The Mercury 30 Spetember, 2006 p.10

Pour L'Amour
Colville Street Gallery
Battery Point
Price range $800 to $2250

Lisa Gipton's exhibition of photographs, Pour L'Amour, was completed in Paris during her residency at the Cite' International des Arts.

The residency in 2005 has resulted in a fascinating body of work, in which Gipton was generously supported by the Polaroid Corporation's artists' support program. Further local backing also came from Midcity Camera World.

The Polaroid Collection, one of the US 's largest corporate collections of art, has acquired two of Gipton's prints. This is quite a feather in her cap, hanging there along side Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Ansel Adams and Robert Maplethorpe.

Gipton's vision of Paris is one of romance and intrigue. The artist digs into the essence of the Eternal City , and does so with a series of pictures that slows the imagination to roam at leisure.

Nelson, Robert Lisa Gipton: Pour L'amour ( Paris ) The Age 6 April, 2006

Digital technology explores the limitations of the chemical trace of light.

It's amusing to watch the birds in a city square, maybe over coffee when, as a tourist, you have the time to contemplate the marvel of natural flight in a dense metropolis. My eye was drawn to the birds in a photograph by Lisa Gipton called The Night the Moon Had Come.

It shows the open place by the Pont Marie. It's getting dark and we're loking upwards: the buildings recede to the horizon and you can sense the stillness of dusk, suddenly interrupted by the hectic excitement of flapping wings. The birds take off.

I can tell by the pigeon closest to me that it's flying somewhat towards me, because I can distinguish the tail feathers from the head in the roughly cruciform shape. The next bird you can interpret similiarly, even though you can't exactly see which end is which. But the third and fourth and fifth pigeons, being further from the lens, are inscrutable: they dissolve into an arabesque and then a blur, a lyrical abstract intervention in the evening light.

Photography tends to do this at some point: it captures movement and detail to a degree that reveals a kind of failure, where you realize that the capture of sight cannot be sustained and the motif breaks up.

In Gipton's exhibition, the photographs are especially grainy and colourful owing to the technique. They begin as polaroids, which were then scanned to produce the digital prints on display. So the digital technology explores the limitations of the chemical trace of light.

Gipton's images show a somewhat wintry unpopulated Paris around the Hotel de Ville, with perspectives observed by generations of painters and photographers; but you sense that the classical city may be wearing new scars. For example, the work with the somewhat sickly title A Lifetime Lived in One Brief Summer Night shows the Seine at the point where Diana, Dodi and driver crashed in the tunnel.

The grain of the photographs doesn't make the images remote, but strangely warm. This is typified by the flock of birds retaining their energetic integrity despite dissolving into the blurry ether.

Fantasy le feminine Melbourne Citybeat 30 March, 2006

When most people go to Paris , they come home with a swag of photos of the Eiffel Tower , the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame.

But photographer Lisa Gipton delved into the Parisian subculture to reveal the city's romantic mythology.

The works on display in Pour l'Amour ( Paris ) were taken when Gipton was on a three month artistic residency at the Cite' International des Arts. She stayed in the perfect location for a photographer – the Rosamund McCulloch Studio, on the first floor of an 18 th –century hotel.

Gipton's photographic work over the past four years has focused on creating images that express a palpable sense of femininity: romantic images that evoke sensations of the erotic, consumer fetishism, the love of adornment and feminine fantasy.

"Pour l'Amour is a cinematic story about one passionate summer night in Paris when two lovers meet for the first time" she said. "It is a story about love and loss, a romantic narrative that describes what occurs during an evening of passion. The narrative titles are intended to give the viewer a clue to the story as it unfolds". Gipton said the inspiration for Pour l'Amour came from a range of sources, including her interest in classic novels such as Madam Bovary .

Nelson, Robert Undiscovered Artists Lisa Gipton Australian Art Collector April-June 2002

Commercial/advertising photographers are often not recognized as being artists. Although they engage their imagination, formidably exercise their wits, and often take stunning photographs, they are in some people's opinion nevertheless tainted with a vulgar purpose – the banal motive of selling someone else's wares or services.

For all that, there are many younger photographic artists who are taking to the language of commercial photography with a vengeance. Slick shoots, lifestyle ambience, charming looks, sharp images, medium format, shameless spectacle, dubious values. Their reasons are various. Sometimes they have a critical purpose: they undermine and ridicule the pretensions, anti-ecological consumerism, agism, sexism and moral superficiality of advertising.

But others seem to infiltrate the commercial sphere with morbid delight in its scandals. They dance with the devil, toying with the profitable premises that prove so seductive to the world of comsumption at large.

One of these artists exercising such cross-over is Lisa Gipton. Her images of perfume bottles and cosmetics in the series Touch Me, Hold Me, Love Me appropriates the language of commerce so successfully that there is something unsettling about their very attractiveness: they seem to be too slick, too sexy; they make the eroticized desire of the consumer goods rather too obvious; and you experience in your lust for the object an uncanny provocation.

Gipton exaggerates the subliminal imagery and snobbish seduction of fashion magazines in a subtle way. She presents cosmetics in front of a small, symmetrical, folded curtain of satin texture and sometimes rich, sanguine colour. The little labial diorama is fashioned to reveal the inside all to well: viola', the lipstick assumes a clitoral presence, its shiny perfection audaciously promoted to the treasury of sexual pleasure.

The works have an artistic ambiguity that makes you unsure of Gipton's purpose. She could be teasing everyone in a genuine identification of a cheap myth; alternatively, she could be teasing us with a psychoanalytical perversion, as if her dioramas represented the phallic woman, the archetype of the girl who best satisfies and flatters the penis. Other readings could be possible: you really have no idea, amid the rush of naughty feelings that overcomes you on the first encounter.