Lisa Conrad

Lives and works in Oakland, CA, USA

Artist statement

Using sculptural materials and time-based media, I build poems from our everyday lifeworld. A background in poetry informs my work, as well as an abiding interest in the infrastructure of our built environment, in overlooked or abandoned public spaces, and the relationship of land to urban environments, whether in cities or passing through rural lands, as railroads do, changing land into landscape. My interventions arise out of a desire to "create in the planned city a 'metaphorical' city or a city in movement" (Michel de Certeau). The work aims to bring about a deep consciousness of a place, a sensitivity to its histories, both visible and invisible: the nature and peoples that have inhabited it over time, and the nature that surrounds it in the present. I hope to evoke the feeling of being in a place and the realization of an imagined place within it: the space of play, (re)connection, freedom. 4 ½ ft (a reference to the standard width of railroads and the unique perspective afforded by their width, grading, and routes) explores the American landscape by bicycling along abandoned railroads converted to trails, illuminating a new line across the country. It navigates the tension between the romance of the railroads and the troubled history of their making. At its heart is the desire to undo what the development of the railroads did—“collapsing time and space”—and instead create a kind of continuous unfolding of time and space; by slowing down, being out in instead of...

Artwork