Robin Lisherness: Letting the materials do the talking
Based on an interview with artist Robin Lisherness. Interviewed and written by Mary Haley, WesArts project coordinator.
We met up with artist Robin Lisherness on a rainy, Thursday evening at the Skowhegan Free Public Library as he prepared for an opening reception for his exhibit. He calls his work, Art with a (re)Purpose, because of its upcycled nature. His pieces are three-dimensional, made from a variety of found materials, and are strongly reminiscent of a stage set—an influence from his love of the theater.
Lisherness is from Strong, Maine but as alumni of University of Maine at Farmington and a retired teacher from Skowhegan Area High School, he identifies with both the Farmington and Skowhegan communities. His heart, he admits, will always be with Farmington because it’s where he got all his “best starts”. The year after he began school at UMF, in the late ’60s, the University president put an emphasis on the arts and begin hiring talented music, art, and theater professors. That infusion of the arts set the stage for Lisherness.
Although currently retired from teaching, Lisherness remains very busy and still does a lot of theater, his primary art expression before he came into his visual art practice. His goal with visual art is to use up the old materials in his dad’s barn—thus, its repurpose. The barn goes back to the 1830s and Lisherness says, “there are so many things in there you can turn into art if you just let it happen”, which is how he finds his inspiration.
Letting it just happen goes beyond the barn. Referring to a piece he has just unpacked, he explains, “I just found these two pieces [of wood] on the ground, put them together, and thought ‘okay, I think it’s a bird’”, he then went home to find its head in the barn.
Lisherness’ work is incredibly engaging and dynamic, pieces share a similar style, but no two are the same. Looking at them all as he unpacks, we ask which his favorite is. It’s not in the staging room we’re in, it’s at the foot of stairs coming down to the exhibit. It’s called Shaman and it’s one of the few not for sale because it’s his favorite, but also because it is his first piece. It’s a mystical creature created from scrap and old tools found in the barn and it inspired Lisherness to make more and more pieces.
There are a lot of different materials incorporated into Lisherness’ work, wood, metal, plastic, figurines and little toys. With so many elements composing one piece it seems the work could go on and on. So how does Lisherness know when a piece is finished? Sometimes, he doesn’t know when, but when he feels like he might be going overboard on a particular piece he’ll set it aside and divert his energy to a different project. Having multiple projects going at once also allows him to keep a fresh eye.
Lisherness rarely experiences creative blocks because it’s the materials themselves that inspire him, “I can’t go by a yard sale, or a flea market, without looking and sometimes I’ll just pick up one little object and say, ‘hm, this is it’, and that’ll turn into something much, much bigger”. This intrigue with materials sometimes gets the best of him, Lisherness jokes the barn looks like the home of a hoarder and he doubts he could use it all in the rest of his life.
As a performance artist and an exhibiting visual artist Lisherness puts a lot of his work out into the world, “art in any community is meant to bring people together”, he says, “through art we share stories, we build emotions, we exchange ideas, and we express our feelings to one another. Performance and visual arts provide us with outlets – and inlets”. Lisherness’ work certainly does all of that.
Most of the pieces are for sale—except for his favorite, of course—for inquires he can be contacted via email at rlisherness@gmail.com. He was also interviewed on the Guest Room, a HooSkow Radio program that interviews musicians, artists, and performers. You can listen to that interview here.
