Sat 11 Feb – Sat 14 Apr 2012, The West Gallery, Quay Arts.

Preview: Sat 11 Feb 3 – 4:30pm All Welcome.

Artist’s Talk: 25 Feb Starts 2:30pm FREE Just turn up.

'Lives of Spaces' is a new body of contemporary work by British artist Lisa Traxler.

Island based artist Lisa Traxler is best known for her now collectable large canvas abstract paintings. Over the years her prolific volume of work has grown to include stitched collages incorporating her photography and archival works and more recently her wall murals and sculptures of vitreous enamel and steel.

In this major solo exhibition at Quay Arts, Traxler responds to the weight of remembered experience, she creates an environmental autobiography – a sense of self and place, intimately connected. Accessing this form of memory-mapping has enabled the artist to extend her practice in new directions, from life-sized enamel and steel sculptures, to ephemeral stitched paper installations alongside her customary textured paintings.

Her current work challenges the concept of self within a space, dissecting the idea through rich colour punctuated by geometric forms, portals into this mind mapping through paint and the sculptural form. Her vibrant abstract paintings of acrylic and graphite on canvas paved the way for most recent works of vitreous enamel on steel.

There is a tension between the nature of the materials used and their transformation into sculpture – paintings in space.

A limited edition book about Traxler’s work ‘Lives of Spaces’, with essays by art critic and author Peter Davies and artist, writer and lecturer, Jonathan Parsons, will accompany this exhibition.

“The revelatory nature of her compositions in space embodies Traxler’s journey from the canvas to the factory and echoes the journey that she has embarked upon in her own life... For Traxler, a picture is the experienced, felt and intuited world – a connection with her own immediate surroundings and way of life.” Jonathan Parsons, ‘Lives of Spaces’ Publication 2012.

Lisa Traxler was born in London where she studied at Croydon Art College and then on to Birmingham where she graduated with a B.A Hons degree in Fashion & Textiles. For many years she worked in London as a fashion editor and costume designer before moving to the Isle of Wight several years ago.

Her award winning art has been widely exhibited across the UK and her enamel and steel mural painted on the outside of the house shared with partner, designer Lincoln Miles, gained huge attention when aired on national television and was commended at the Architects Journal Awards, London (2011). Public Art Commissions include the multi-panelled enamel and steel wall mural for the entrance foyer to the new Art & Design College, Stourbridge, West Midlands (2011). A large enamel and steel triptych situated in the double height space of the entrance foyer of Vestas Technology Centre, IOW (2011), and the large scale folding wall at Briddlesford Education Centre, IOW, (2010).