LYNETTE FISHER

LYNETTE FISHER


Lynette Fisher is a Tauranga based creative practitioner and part-time academic staff member at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, teaching on the Bach. Creative Industries degree.

Her art practice ranges from printmaking, drawing, assemblage, and painting, all of which have featured in solo and group shows around New Zealand. Her work is held in public and private collections. She works in the space between drawing and painting, dry-brush and wax pencil works on canvas evoking memories of blackboards or schoolhouse slates. A mostly monochrome palette is indicative of her style - where colour is used it is subtle and sparse.
Lynette’s recurrent themes investigate our innate humanness - appropriating existing imagery and re-placing it in awkward, misplaced, and reimagined worlds. There is an underlying sense of nostalgia and tension between past and present where space, time, and identity are separated. Lynette works from her studio in Te Puna, where works can be viewed by appointment.
This suite of work looks at themes of adoption, appropriation, and ownership. The taking from one culture and wedging it into another, or choosing to adopt or appropriate another culture as we see fit. Layers of meaning are brought in specifically to underpin this particular series. Certain imagery is sought out and reinterpreted from many sources - social media, personal photographs, and intentionally lifted from well known historical photographic collections. A pose, a person, a scene, a narrative is taken and recontextualized, re-homed, adopted.
The questions surrounding the very act of appropriation are posed.
Do we ask permission?
Is it ours for the taking?
Where are the lines drawn?