Short Bio
Lisa Willgress (b. 1982, Great Yarmouth, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, collage, installation, and photography. Her work explores ownership of identity, desire, class, and politics of the body, under a capitalist context. Her work references themes of mythology, gender, consumerism, and religion, Willgress reconfigures everyday objects to reflectively critique contemporary systems of value.
Her practice delves into class, art history, neurodivergence, and identity, revealing the psychological and cultural tensions that shape the contemporary human experience. Informed by both personal and collective narratives, Willgress’s work considers how identity is constructed, consumed, and challenged within visual culture. She lives and works in Norwich, UK.
Statement
Lisa Willgress is a conceptual artist working across sculpture and installation. Her works blend found objects, casting, and hand building, exploring the relationship with consciousness and contemporary autonomy, challenging identity through metaphor and re-production. Embedded in themes of mythology, consumerism, and class, Willgress weaves story, the cinematic, and consumer culture to develop works that are vibrant and deeply layered. She creates an uncanny objectification and elevation of materiality and the feminine, whilst playing with our ideas of conformity and desire. Willgress’s work plays with value structures to present charged, matriarchal spaces that blend with an innately dark and dissociated sense of humour, giving a sense that she is skirting around the edges of the philosophical in the everyday.
Notably, Willgress has exhibited at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Inland Projects:Neither, and, more recently, was awarded the Eaton Art Prize Fund, 2025. Willgress founded a creative studio in 2023 and continues to collaborate with a diverse range of students and professionals in the fields of design and music.
Willgress graduated with first-class honours in 2017 from the Norwich University of the Arts with aBachelor of Fine Art and is currently studying towards an MFA, specialising in sculpture.
“Storytelling has always functioned as a collective tool to empower and enrich our culture, to expand our knowledge, build on our values, and hand down the truth about metamorphosis and overpowering beasts across millennia. Today, we live in a society designed for the advancement of capitalism and technology, and the pay off for our compliance is our consumer narrative. Once you take the tool and the story out of the hands of common people, we collectively become disenfranchised, losing faith in ourselves and each other. The idea of over coming the beasts seems like too tall a task to even contemplate. We lose our strength, ferocity and connection, respectively. At the behest of the ruling class, with little or no interest in social or cultural advancement of proportionately lower classes, one might question where our collective sense of identity, value and culture is derived, or indeed, from whom. What contemporary ‘folk’ lores do we have embolden us?”
- Lisa Willgress, 2025.