About
Louise Pallister (b.1966 UK) examines our relationship with other animals through drawing, printmaking, animation, and writing. Her first degree gave her the opportunity to focus on life drawing and specialise in ceramic sculpture, laying the foundations for her style of drawing ‘in the round’. She went on to work in galleries and commercial art studios around the country, before returning to art school as a mature student in 2014. After an intensive year of drawing and printmaking at City & Guilds of London Art School she graduated her MA with Distinction, winning the Slaughterhaus Print Prize as she did so. Pallister has since shown at the Mall Galleries, RBSA, Woolwich Print Fair, Ferens Art Gallery, Gallagher & Turner, and Northern Print among others. A bursary award in 2018 from the Society of Wildlife Artists allowed her to create an edition of artists books for display at the Mall Galleries. Recent collaborations include Louisa Crispin’s Flightpath and Kinstinct Lost Wax for Lost Species projects. Pallister currently lives and works in Suffolk, UK.
Statement
The writer Kathleen Jamie has described the act of looking at nature more deeply as one of ‘resistance and renewal’. Louise Pallister’s practice gives attention to the lives of other animals, often focusing on their position in relation to us. Close observation of fellow animals in zoos, sanctuaries and the wild, underpins her work. Whether highlighting the status of a species (extinct, endangered) or an individual plight, Pallister is interested in what can be learned from an encounter with an animal other and described by mark making.
Through drawing, printmaking, photography and animation, she aims to invoke life from the static page, preferring materials that can be manipulated to suggest movement or ambiguity. Drawings are made in charcoal and conte: subtle mediums that accept erasure and revision. In printmaking she prefers techniques that remain close to the drawn mark, drypoint etching, monotype and even the literal transfer of drawings through photopolymer and gum Arabic processes.
The resulting works reveal unseen or unnoticed aspects of the animals before us: traces of movement leave ghostly impressions, fragile bodies are transparent or obscured, human boundaries restrict agency. They examine the ways in which we are both intimate with, and ignorant of, sentient animals.
Writing is part of the thinking process through which Pallister filters her art; a way to navigate and reflect on her thoughts and experiences of art and nature. Her essays can be read at online art magazine The Learned Pig.
An advocate for the voiceless animal, Pallister’s practice often fuses opposing states of presence and absence to suggest that there is more to be revealed about the lives of other animals or highlight the inequitable performance of human power on our animal kin. It asks the viewer to look closely at the wavering line between perception and reality: to imagine the known unknowns of the natural world.
