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.
Statement
Lisa Willgress is an emerging 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 identity, 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. Her discerning material vocabulary creates a real time sense of the artist attempting to resolve herself through the pieces, revealing the psychological and cultural tensions shaping 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.
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 art dand music.
Gaduating with 1st class hons Bachelors in Fine Art from NUA in 2017, she is currently studying towards an MFA, specialising in sculpture. She is based in Norwich, UK.