Her Island of Lost Mind
@ Skirt Franchise
May 2021
“I come down the stairs or out of the adjacent rooms, always holding something, such as a towel. A towel, a newspaper I haven’t been reading, a piece of laundry, a glass. Like something reclaimed and brought back from another world. And I don’t stop. I pass right through and vanish into another part of the house.”
Pond, ‘A Little Before Seven,’ Claire-Louise Bennett
There is an inherent tension performed in Luisa’s paintings that draws me in and upwards to a place inhabited by moths at night, five-petaled flowers, cold feet, reaching hands, moon, and rounded archways. These forms and symbols seem to be presented “as a matter of sacred urgency,” sharing something with me, but never too much and just enough. Thus, a tender understanding is formed.
Her paintings also surge towards me with such sober sharpness before enfolding me again in nebulous ambiguity. In the aftermath, their many layered identities lap at my feet, reluctant to enfold once more.
I read somewhere that life is about managing how much of yourself you share with people, while also allowing a significant part to remain unspoken so you feel present and vital within yourself. Foregoing conventional language for symbols and forms is a way to approach this; to create a sense of self that is ever-becoming, rather than caught by some boundary.
Of the few pieces I have by Luisa, there is one propped above my mirror – quite high up – that provides the kind of comfort and tenuousness that language won’t quite express. Five flowers, each with five petals, are scattered across the bottom of the composition. Undulating between fullness and fragility, I cannot tell if they are rising or falling. Sometimes, on days when I decide they are rising, I whisper “promise me?” as if that would help to demystify their presence. But then I think, that is the point. It was never meant to be easy. And isn’t that an enchanting relation to have to the world. A kind of magic of identity rather than a logic.
Words by Liz Smith