Lisa Hirmer
Lisa Hirmer is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Guelph, Ontario, whose practice spans visual media, social practice, performance, art-based research, and occasional writing. She is primarily concerned with collective relationships, in communities and public spaces as well as within more-than-human ecologies. In her public practice, she explores the complicated public life of ideas. In her photo and text-based works, she studies the forces that shape and transform human relationships with surrounding ecologies. In 2019, she received a grant for a project entitled “Watching Moths,” which weaves connections between humans, light, moths, and photography and questions how harm can be slow and cumulative, how human sight shapes our relationships with other beings, and how we might expand ideas of care for animals.
Due to the pandemic, Lisa shifted her focus onto crafting the Winter Sow Booklet—a documentation that encourages people to sow summer flowers during the wintertime in their gardens or balconies to nourish under-appreciated nocturnal pollinators. Consider sowing seeds next winter season, and visit Lisa’s website for more information. In 2020, Lisa’s book of poetry titled Forests Not Yet Here was published by Publication Studio Guelph and in 2021, she received a grant from Pollination Guelph to build a night garden for moths. Lisa exhibited a series of photographs titled “Everything We Have Done Is Weather Now” from January to May of 2023 at her solo show in the University of Lethbridge’s art gallery.
Lisa was interviewed by Sangamithra Iyer for CAF in 2019 on a previous project called “Tree Time.”
Lisa’s project echoes that of 2021 grantee Roberto Mendez-Arreola, who received a grant for “Monarch Butterfly and People Co-Stories,” a research project which analyzed reports that farmers, amateur naturalists, and professional scientists shared through digital platforms about the migratory route of the Monarch butterfly in Mexico.
