LISA SNOOK

b.1970, England.

Lives and works in London.

Biography

Lisa Snook is a Suffolk based artist and member of The Royal Society of Sculptors.  She trained at Chelsea College of Arts and Goldsmiths College (BA HONS) in the early 1990’s.  Shortly after graduating, her work was selected for a prominent London exhibition at the Lost In Space gallery and notably reviewed in The Independent on Sunday. It was in these early years that Snook developed a unique and intimate language of emotional intensity through sculptural form. 

Since then, her work has been shown nationally and internationally, is held in a number of private and public collections and has been reviewed in a wide range of publications, including Culture24 who described her work as 'Mature, surreal and haunting.'  In 2022 the Financial Times described Snook's practice as, ‘weaving philosophical notions of memento mori into her work’. 

In 2014 Snook trained to become an art psychotherapist and received her Masters in 2018.  This has deepened her capacity to implement psychoanalytics into her making process and, in recent years, has led her work in the direction of examining the relationship between psychological states of mind and their expression in the human body. 

In 2023 her work The Limits of Anguish won the 10.000 euro FBZ art award in Germany.  A prestigious award that recognises the interplay between mental health and creative discourse. 

Artist Statement

I have been a sculptor for over thirty years.  Since I began my training in the early 1990’s, I have been working sculpturally, it always made more sense to me because of its relationship to the body.

My interest in the body has continued and developed over the years into a deeper understanding of the bodymind axis.   My practice explores how the musculature of the body holds and expresses psychological states of mind and my work is an expression of the tension between what is felt and what is seen, making the unconscious - conscious.  

I recognise the human body as collector of memory and my work is a re-telling of these memories.

My pieces begin in clay and either remain in raw form, or, are cast in bronze. Fundamentally, my practise is concerned with translating feeling into form . 

I am interested in the meaning, purpose and value of human existence.  This line of enquiry often leads me to explore fairytale and myth, which I see as cultural bastions of society's long held stories that warn us of danger and trauma. I’m interested in how these stories reflect belief systems and how and where they show they show up in my work.

I see my practice as living at the intersection of physical expression and emotional trauma. I find physical expression through haptic connection with clay,  it’s how I make the unconscious, conscious.  Emotional trauma surfaces in my work through the marks left behind in the clay, the clawed indentations, the disembodied parts and the gestural expression.  

My sculptures are visceral and speak of the binary connections between trauma and memory, love and loss, ritual and remembrance. I aim to make something of beauty with an underbelly of darkness, knowing that nothing remains the same.