Born 1985, Lottie Consalvo is a Newcastle based artist originally form Melbourne.
Lottie Consalvo’s practice traverses painting, performance, video, photography and sculpture. Her work explores psychological shifts and how time, places and imagery alter our consciousness.
‘Lottie Consalvo contemplates time. Years, nano-seconds, moments of eternity, transition, points of no return – these moments of between and becoming are explored in abstract paintings and across mediums. Consalvo’s interdisciplinary practice includes performative and often quite specific autobiographical references.’ – Jo Higgins
The artist’s paintings often make reference to spiritual places such as stone arrangements, religious alters, public and private shrines and natural phenomenas such as waterfalls, great heights and the blurring shift in the act of falling. Whilst Consalvo’s performances are observations of quietly transformative experiences – from her 12- month long durational performance, Compartmentalise in 2012 where the artist lived with minimal possessions in an attempt to find a place of clarity, to her performance Near your sorrow where the artist sang along with a recording of a loved one who has passed away, singing together in harmony but very much apart. This performance is about the incomprehensibility of the loss of something so great. A longing that can never be cured, a love and loss that can never be fully grasped; the attempt to find a place where the present and past can exist together, an inevitable impossibility.
Through her performances her audience witness the transformative affect of memory in real-time as Consalvo moves through deeply personal places as part of long duration performances and immersive engagements with the fractured, uncanny spaces of the present. Like her performances, her paintings further this conversation whereby the artist creates a physical presence for imagination, memory and psychological transitions.
Working with a restricted palette across mediums, she paints often monumental forms referencing memory, landscape, altars, shrines and sacred places. The simple forms, the vastly empty spaces, the high contrast of opposing dark and light and the outcome of an almost impoverished surface sees Consalvo’s manifestation of the unknown, the invisible and the intangible.
