Berkshire County artist Lisa Nilsson began her career in painting and illustration for greeting cards and magazines, moved into 3D shadowbox work and then into quilling (intricate work with paper), which gained her worldwide attention from places like The Huffington Post, Smithsonian.com and "The Independent." She has been awarded The Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, the Artist’s Resource Trust Grant and, in 2012, was asked to discuss her practice at the TEDMED conference in Washington, D.C. I grew up in Avon, Mass. and attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where I majored in illustration. After graduating, I moved from Rhode Island to Cleveland when I was recruited by the card company American Greetings. I lived there for 6 years, and when I met my husband, Rich Remsberg, I moved to where he lived in Bloomington and we stayed there for 12 years. One of our friends was looking for a loft space and saw Eric Rudd’s press conference about the Eclipse Mill in North Adams. She bought the very first space and then we moved into the mill, as well. I have a lot of immediate and extended family who live in New England, so it was a good fit for us.
I began working with quilling in 2009 when I first started experimenting with it as a medium to use in the boxes I was making. I wanted to shift from depicting objects in my paintings to using objects, and boxes allowed me to shift materials often. A friend of mine knew I liked science and medical imagery and she sent me an illustration she thought I would like. I had intended to make a representation of it to use in a box but it grew too large and became a stand-alone piece. From there I started doing image searches for anatomy illustrations, and over the next five or six years I made two bodies of work that were focused only on anatomy. There was a gallery in New York City, the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, that I had been approaching with my work for 10 years, but when my quillwork began getting more press, I was more confident in approaching them with those pieces. Finally the gallery owner said yes, and ended up selling all of my anatomical pieces.
I work every day, but I produce really slowly; it takes me about 2 and a half or three years to produce enough work for a show. I’ve been working on my most recent piece for six or seven months. When creating the anatomy pieces, I developed shapes and textures that I couldn’t exploit to their fullest, and also I was limited in my color palette. When the same friend had a catalog of Persian rugs at her house, I thought that was a good next step for me, and I’ve made three pieces so far based on that rug structure. Neither Rich nor I would like to live in a city, and the western part of Massachusetts is quiet yet allows for relatively easy travel to New York, Boston and D.C. when he and I need to travel for work. I like the attention to contemporary art that MASS MoCA provides to the area, both from the museum itself and the trickling out which allows for a lot of artists to live here. The two colleges make for smart and interesting people. I also love Frog Lotus Yoga in the Beaver Street Mill; I go there every day.
