lisa temple-cox | mixed media

lisa temple-cox

memorabilia, melancholia, mythology: The product of mixed parentage, being brought up in Malaysia has left me with a divided personality. From my Malay mother, I inherited a fascination for the darker side, an animistic approach to existence, a tendency to emote. Melodrama and an excess of emotional outbursts were common during my childhood, as well as the telling of ghost stories and the likelihood of being punished by demons. On the other side, from my English father - an engineer- I have inherited a certain no-nonsense, empirical approach: reason, logic, science and craftsmanship. I remember as a child sitting around the kitchen with my mother and the servants, hearing tales of how someone's uncle was swallowed whole by a python, and how his ghost still roamed around the path in the jungle where he was ingested... I have a vague memory of my father killing an enormous snake, and nailing its head to a tree so that he could skin it... there was a huge growth of orchids in the tree... all these things combine in my mind, and contribute to my notion of the world. Real events and tall stories exist side by side, of equal importance, and it all make a kind of sense. However, memories of my childhood are few, and the photographs were destroyed during my parent’s bitter divorce. My recent work is, for the first time, an exploration of my colonial childhood, and the dislocation I felt upon arriving in England – an attempt to evoke the feelings and memories of that other world, a journey made without paths or signs. I am re-creating my history, using the few photos that are left, and any other bits and pieces I have collected along the way. I work to music, all kinds of music – dance, rock, classical, psychedelia, ambient…. It occupies a part of my mind, while my hands are doing something else. (I used to work in a record shop – sadly it had nothing to do with music and everything to do with product.) If I wasn’t an artist I would be a musician. Or poet. Or possibly just a bum. I am a cat person.

https://www.axisweb.org/p/lisatemplecox/