Lisa McCleary is an Irish-Australian artist currently living in New York. In 2015 she received her BFA Honours degree from UNSW Art & Design Sydney, and in 2018 completed her MFA Degree at Parsons, NYC. She has exhibited internationally with a solo show at Palmer Art Projects in both 2015 and 2016. McCleary showcased her work in several group exhibitions last year including Unsentimental, Recoded: Strategies of Queer Abstraction and Between. She has won both the Art Scene and Eckersley’s Painting Awards, and in 2016 was a finalist in the M.Contemporary YAI Award. In 2018 her work will be showcased in Art on 52nd St., Growing Pebbles and The Seattle Erotic Arts Festival.

Through painting, sculpture and installation I create a space in which self-pleasure, agency, desire and the digital and real body are in play. I am interested in the pleasure of flesh and the way that that translates into our desire for our communication devices, and our corporeal relationship to industrial materials.

I focus on the gesture of hands and fingers to allude to autoeroticism, in the aim to create an aggressive autonomous body. My practice addresses haptic sensations and the representation and embodiment of touch. The skin and the screen surface work as interchangeable metaphors for both sexual and visual pleasure.

My work evokes pleasure and discusses choice and agency through an investigation of the body. Through the medium of paint I explore distinct aesthetics and capabilities of the flesh. My interests lie with sites of simultaneous vulnerability and strength and the indexical quality of affected flesh. The visual imagery I employ simultaneously approaches defilement and transcendence to suggest alternative sexuality.

I explore industrial materials and their correlation to BDSM culture, the pattern of scarred flesh and the interface or black mirror. I am searching for a new system of pleasure that is both seductive and repulsive and cultivates an abject experience.