Welcome

Louisa Chase is a British artist and researcher.  In 2004, she emigrated to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and lived there for 18 years, returning to the UK in 2022.  She is currently based in the Fenlands of rural Lincolnshire, where she grew up.

Exposure to Te Ao Māori - the Māori worldview - through working in environmental conservation, through friendships, and through immersion has been central to the process of re-orientating her life and work to focus on path-finding through her native European indigenous traditions and practices​​.  Louisa considers the idea that these have been irrevocably lost to be an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees knowledge as existing only within the individual.  Experience has taught her that knowledge is dispersed and diffracted; that our brains and bodies are not isolated discrete units, but part of a network of interconnected relationality. Knowledge is held not only within the individual human, but within the wider environment, landscape, and more-than-human others, all of which need to be listened to and collaborated with.

Louisa’s work almost always begins with walking and outdoor movement practice (loosely connected to ecosomatics), and develops from there to include writing, ritual, photography and working with handmade plant and earth paints.  She works intentionally with duration, cycles, and the many layers of the local.

Her work is anti-spectacle, slow, quiet, and grounded in practices of witnessing and deep listening​. She incorporates research into ecological, spiritual, cultural, historical, and ancestral perspectives, questioning hierarchies that have led to the multiple crises which we and the planet now face.

Louisa describes the embodied practices through which she develops her work as ancestral portals to knowing - ways of being in the world that were once essential for survival and balance - walking, working with plants as allies and medicine, reciprocity, ritual, silence, listening with land, more-than-human kin, and natural cycles. In the process, she raises questions about materials and about who we make art for and with, seeing art not just as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a process of caring for all life.

Diagnosed with autism later in life, Louisa draws on her lived experience of the body-mind as a kind of sensory antenna; a fractal of the whole, tuning into the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.