Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Jackson.
Lisa, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I have been an animal lover my entire life. For years I went to Austin Memorial Cemetery several times a week to feed a murder of crows. I studied birds and wildlife and my friends would contact me when they found injured animals. I was at my dance studio one day and my friend informed me there was a dead grackle in front of the studio and she didn’t want the kids to see it so I moved it to a flowerbed. I had been becoming more and more intrigued by skeletal biology and the ways we deal culturally with death so I found myself checking on the dead bird periodically to see its decomposition. Once the dermestid beetles had cleaned the flesh off, I took the skeleton home with me. I had some small wooden coffins from Halloween so I painted one and arranged the spine and skull inside. This led to an art series of small coffins with found dead creatures: lizards, insects, amphibians, birds. That was my foray into art. This all occurred right before the pandemic lockdown so I spent a lot of my isolation time organically letting my artwork go where it wanted. I began ordering ethically sourced moths and learning how to mount them so I could use them in sculptures and the pandemic opened up a world of classes online so I was able to learn taxidermy techniques. I had to leave my marriage right before the world shut down and while I didn’t plan it this way, I think my artwork helped me process the grief, but it is still all born out of the way that I have always viewed the world. I see so much beauty in places that a lot of people seem averse to–death, bones, beetles, moths. I like using art to let these “ugly” things be seen in a beautiful or humorous way. I also use a lot of iconography from Haitian Vodou. Before the pandemic, I wrote a novel based in Haitian Vodou. It is a beautiful religion in which it is no good or evil, there are opportunities for growth. Things happen in life and in Vodou, it is about what you do with the things that happen. It has been horribly portrayed in Western media and I wanted people to see how wonderful it was in my novel. While going through the grief of losing my marriage and being locked away from people I love by the pandemic, I wanted nothing to do with words so I put the novel aside and only wanted to make art and dance, so my love of Haitian Vodou has come into my art through that avenue. Currently, as the world has opened back up to a large extent, I find myself coming back to reading and writing. My art has really just been for me, finding joy in the play of it, but when I was part of the East Austin Studio Tour I found other people looking at the insects and bones and being fascinated like children, the same way that it makes me feel. It was wonderful to feel that connection and give that same joy of life through the lens of death to others. There are all these tiny creatures flitting and scurrying about in our world and maybe we don’t see them because we are flitting and scurrying too but in their death, we are allowed the chance to peer into them in a way we can’t in real-time.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I haven’t really had a road. I’ve just been going with the flow. But the process has definitely give me the opportunity to learn about letting go. It has shown me that nothing is forever and nothing can be made so precious that we are broken if it changes. Change is in fact the only constant and “life is just a series of changing relationships,” as my father told me. Working with such fragile medium, these little exquisite bones and exoskeletons that have been intricately evolved over billions of years, it feels like the material is so precious, but it’s also very easily destroyed, so you have to be grateful for the abundance of life. One of the moments that helped me realize this was that I had mounted a couple of expensive rather large moths from South America. They were drying on their pinning board and I left the house. When I returned my cat had jumped up and eaten half of one so that all that was left was its body and one wing, and she had eaten a whole Black Witch moth that was now thrown up on the floor. I saved the pieces I could and made a new vision with what was left and signed the pieces as Lisa Jackson and Little Girl (my cat). She passed last year. I had her for 19 years. I seriously thought about the idea of taxidermying her. She taught me so much about love.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I work as a creative in several fields: comedy, dance, visual art and writing. Something that sets me apart in my art and writing is that I used to be a scientist and I’m still very in love with science even though I am no longer in that realm. It informs my worldview and my inspiration. I also use a lot of humor in all of my creative fields. I definitely spent time making a tiny top hat and cane for a dead cicada which cracks me up. In fact, I’m very proud of the humor that I find in the worst of situations, proud that I’m able to find positivity in the darkest parts of life.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
TAKE ALL THE RISKS! FUCK SHIT UP! We get one life. What’s the worse that could happen? Risks help us find out things we didn’t even know about ourselves, about the world, about others. I’d say a big risk for me was having to leave what had been a loving, supportive, and healthy 10-year relationship because it had become unhealthy in an instant. To find out that someone I deeply trusted, whose life was intertwined with mine, had been lying to me was so emotionally, mentally and physically confusing that it was a huge risk to say, “all this amazing love and connection I’ve had for 10 years, I need to leave that behind. All of the life I planned as this family, I need to leave that behind, and I have no clue what will be my foundation next.” But, and here’s why I say take all the risks, I have discovered amazing things about myself, my strength, my belief in love, about the depths of love that my friends and family and even strangers have for me, about embracing what matters and giving my fullest self even when all of it is transient. And I took that risk, not knowing the things that would come after–the isolation of the pandemic which took away a lot of my life since I was a performer, the onset of my father’s dementia who I am very close to, the loss of a pet I’d had for 19 years, and with each new grief I found out how amazing I am, how much abundance I have, and how much I have to give.
Contact Info:v
- Website: https://www.lisamichellejackson.com
- Instagram: lena7098
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.jackson.3114
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Image Credits
Earl McGehee
Meredith Newell
