The works of British born artist Lisa Willgress (b.1982) are conceptual, symbolic, political and bodily. Themes of neo-mythology and duality underpin her assemblages, narrative portraits and installations, as she constructs a collection of works that blend nostalgia and liminality through found objects and fragmented sculpture.

Working predominantly in plaster, metal, plastic and foam, Willgress will often charge the spaces that hold her work, by introducing coloured light as another tool that prepares it for its audience. Sometimes, including video, scent or sound.

Her use of materiality and metaphor creates a sense of nostalgic dislocation, memory and playfulness, which she attributes to her formative years growing up in a seaside ‘funfair’ town, and her neurodivergent experience of it. Her work re-evaluates class, poverty, solo-parenting, sexual abuse and mental illness. Citing her work as ‘activated and intuitive research’, they are a practice in understanding identity, desire, and our contemporary notions of value and autonomy.

Willgress’ intricate inner world is underpinned by a matriarchal narrative, with recurrent states of dissociation, sex and survival. By casting found and handmade pieces, she leaves remnants of her hand and a record of her choice, considering the value given or removed in an object or a body. Memory, metaphor, herself and female take form. An old Halloween mask, a string of fresh water pearls, mirrors, succulent fruit. Her intentionality enriches her visual language to communicate and connect complex, neurodivergent processing and psyche. Her practice is a relentless prodding at bigger, philosophical questions in the restless duality of mother and woman.

Notably, Lisa Willgress has exhibited at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Inland Projects with 198 and, more recently, received the Eaton Art Prize Fund, 2025.
She is currently based in Norwich, where she lives with her son.