Lisa Willgress

The Feytes is a three-room immersive installation concept exploring identity, gender, and the feminine through a neurodivergent lens. Aiming to examine capitalist and contemporary consumer philosophies of the feminine, exposing cultural connections and the changing ways we interact, the ownership of our bodies and the autonomy of our minds. My practice interprets these themes through relational symbolism, combining the ready-made, found object, sculpture, collage, installation and set design. Symbolism, humour and sexuality are sewn into my visual vocabulary. The neurodivergent duality of my mind, where disgust and desire, or other opposing states, are experienced simultaneously, is almost otherworldly. Immersing visitors in the work, it unfolds around them, layered triptychs, carpeted walls and ceilings, repeated ceramic and resin sculptures, large-scale prints, video, audio, and interactive pieces. Every room will carry its own scent, colour palette, audio and lighting, transforming and enveloping each visitor. Each space reflects how my own dissociative experience can pluck me out of one world and drop me into another. I invite the viewer into my mind to encounter works that are both subversive and vulnerable. Interactive textures invite physical engagement, and headphones, gloves and sunglasses provide support to neurodivergent and sensory-sensitive visitors. The central room features the main sculpture, Lilith. Cast out of the Garden of Eden and demonised under the patriarchal narrative. An eight-foot sculpture, created with layers of long black hair covering any distinguishable possible features, thus, identity. The hair becomes a wedding train, dragging along the floor, lying in a ‘seeping puddle of milk’. Lilith connects to twinned abstract bodies via umbilical-like tubing. These are generously adorned with fruits, feathers and jewels, on oscillating podiums, confronting the viewer with desire, resistance and power. The preceding room represents the stage between childhood and adulthood, highlighting how early identity formation is vulnerable to cultural, familial and capitalist influence. Soft play areas with ready-made, uncanny pieces and‘Fun House’ mirrors. My work, ‘First Word’ (CICA, 2018), influences this room. This video challenges the male gaze that encroaches on the feminine consciousness. The following room represents reclamation of female pleasure and finding oneself. At the centre stands a floral ceramic fountain crowned with synchronised swimmers, symbolising the ownership and enjoyment of the female orgasm. A heavy red curtained wall with flanking glass urns connects to the fountain, transforming the room into an altar-like environment, reframing what has been silenced or shamed into acts of worship and celebration. All the rooms draw on the ‘power of three’, with subtle alignment with the womb and ovaries and the inversion (the phallus and testes). This bold, immersive installation is both intimate and political. Placing the neurodivergent experience at its centre, offering a vivid, multi-sensory journey into resistance, identity and reclamation. Designed for high accessibility, inviting engagement through sight, sound, scent and touch. Through this project, I aim to open conversations around patriarchy, religion and capitalism, and the emergence of social atrophy and ambiguous loss. The Feytes is conceived as a tourable work to grow through collaboration and dialogue, extending nationally and internationally.

This work explores the complex relationship between connection, self-awareness, and the objectification of the feminine, reflecting on how societal and inherited ideologies shape desire, behavior, and identity. Through two interconnected sculptural figures, the piece examines the duality of femininity as both desired and subdued. The first, a fetishized fusion of domestic and erotic symbols, 1960s lamp adorned with black hair, long nails, and a piercing hat pin, embodies the tension between comfort, beauty, and submission. The second, smaller and softer form, linked to the first by a tube, evokes the womb and vulnerability, supported by precarious hairpin legs and attached to a vacuum pump used on female genitalia. Together, the forms question how femininity is constructed, fetishized, and controlled, while the artist’s forthcoming work Mother promises a deeper exploration of autonomy, desire, and exhibitionism in contemporary womanhood.

Two words: First Word appeared at the as part of the Objectified exhibition at CICA Museum, South Korea, 2018, and as part of the Inland Neither exhibition at 198 in Brixton in 2017.
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This performance and video work explores the power dynamics of desire and the gaze, using irony and discomfort to challenge the viewer’s role as spectator. Set within a hyper-feminised, childlike environment of fake grass, pink cellophane, helium balloons, and playful props such as lollipops and a space hopper, the scene evokes innocence while hinting at sexualization. As the performer shifts from coquettish playfulness to a cold, confrontational stare, the viewer becomes the one observed, exposed under her gaze. The layered soundtrack, blending sweet 1960s & 70s pop songs with the unsettling sound of exaggerated lollipop licking, intensifies the tension between seduction and repulsion. Through this uneasy interplay, the work interrogates how femininity, youth, and sexuality are consumed and distorted under the male gaze.

Exhibited at The Other Art Fair in London’s Truman Brewery in 2016, this installation subverted the fair’s commercial art environment by presenting a raw, immersive space reflecting poverty, loneliness, and social invisibility. Drawing from her experience as a working-class single mother, the artist recreated a domestic scene using charity shop finds, hand-painted “mouldy” wallpaper, and everyday objects to evoke the decay and neglect of life below the poverty line. Inspired by stories of spontaneous human combustion, the piece symbolised the quiet, isolating despair of those who “burn out” unseen, living and fading away in solitude. Through this hauntingly intimate reconstruction, the artist questioned both the value of art in capitalist culture and society’s indifference toward the struggles of the marginalised, challenging viewers to confront what, and who, remains invisible within the art world and beyond.

This piece is an intimate retelling of my period of nightmarish reality, making an obvious reference to Tracey Emin’s work, My Bed. This work, however, was very much a representation of the lived experience of sexual abuse and depression and a period of intense mental disconnection.

A lifeless ‘body’ lies under mattress filler material, pulled from the mattress, repurposed as a blanket. The shop model, typically frozen in a displayed position with a fixed and enduring smile. Dressed in the clothes I had been wearing for days and nights on end. I used this as an disembodied, empty, numb, human-like object, as this captured me, and my sense of self, utterly eroded. I was at the time classed as a vulnerable adult, with undiagnosed PTSD, diagnosed dissociative disorder, and the perpetrator of the abuse had videotaped ‘sessions’, and he informed me amongst his many other folders of his 'conquests', he'd filed me under ’Scum’, which I knew was inspired by the SCUM Manifesto book he'd noted on my bookshelf. Next to the mattress were cups, one of which had the words ‘Good Morning Beautiful’ on it. I thought the placement was really powerful in this context. Sad, funny and tragic. The mattress was the actual mattress on which the acts of sexual violence were carried out. There is still a black restraint tied to the mattress handle. I cut the bed down the middle for this piece, and black paint was poured on it. In this way, the darkness was being visually represented for all to see, as I hadn’t told anyone about what was happening to me throughout my relationship. The notion of the mattress being the place where one can rest, and sleep and maybe even be embraced and loved. This mattress was a place of sleep deprivation, humiliation, degredation, abuse and of countless nights and hours spent drugged and desperately holding on to my mind and sanity.