About the artist
Louise Fisher is an Minnesota-based visual artist and holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a BFA from the University of Northern Iowa. Fisher currently resides in the Twin Cities, where she teaches drawing and printmaking courses in the Art Department at Normandale Community College. Louise has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and her work has been included in private and public collections such as the Zuckerman Museum of Art, the University of North Florida and the Wichita Art Museum. Her most recent accomplishments include receiving the 2023-2024 Jerome Fellowship at Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the 2021 Jordan Holly Fellowship Award as an artist-in-residence at In Cahoots. In her work, Louise explores themes of landscape and environmental psychology through prints, artist books and installations.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist working in the expanded field of printmaking; using methods of layering, sequence, and repetition for its metaphorical enactment of time and memory. My current work explores how the built environment affects humans as well as its broader impact on the ecosystem. Some questions that prompt my work include: how does artificial light at night change our experience of time? Does the emphasis on squares in conventional architecture contribute to linear thinking?
I’m largely driven by the physical and emotional responses I have to my surroundings. This reflects a larger field of study called “environmental psychology”, which examines interactions between people and their physical environments, as well as its effects on human behavior and health by analyzing visual cues such as layout, color, texture and lighting. Place especially has a profound effect on my artwork. I grew up in the rural Midwest, where I had access to expansive skies and tallgrass prairies that both inspired and calmed me. This is my inner landscape, and I take it with me wherever I go–giving me a heightened awareness of the external environment.
My work dramatically changed when I moved from rural Iowa to Phoenix, where I noticed the adverse effects noise and light pollution had on my mental health. I began researching circadian rhythms and expressing my discomfort in works such as the Circadian project and the 24/7 Interior series. More broadly, I am part of a larger decades-long migration from rural to urban areas and it’s projected to only increase. With the majority of the Earth’s population in urban areas, I wonder: will anyone in the future know what it’s like to see or hear the land without evidence of humans?
In my work, the visual barriers to the sky, such as grids and windows, capture the feeling scholars have coined “species loneliness”–the alienation humans feel from the landscape and nature at large. My process begins by photographing skies and architectural elements in my immediate surroundings, which sometimes become drawings, digital prints, or vectors for laser cutting. In my work, I combine these images to point out commonly overlooked juxtapositions in the landscape–such as hard-edged windows and soft clouds. By integrating visual opposites such as geometric and organic forms, and digital and hand-drawn imagery, I point to our mediated experience of nature and a longing for the more-than-human world. In seeing my artwork, I help others reconsider their relationship to the land.
Influential Texts
Headspace: The Psychology of City Living by Paul Keedwell
Welcome to Your World by Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Your Brain on Nature by Eva M. Selhub and Alan C. Logan
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch
The End of Night by Paul Bogard
In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki