Sara Lisch
Artist Statement
My work is not illustration. It is psychic architecture.
I construct images through layering, cutting, assembling, and reassembling — a slow building of internal space. Paper, pattern, paint, and fragment are brought together until a figure emerges, not as a character, but as a state of embodiment. The body in my work is less a subject and more a vessel — a site where emotional current gathers, moves, and transforms.
I am interested in how feeling inhabits form. Joy, tension, expansion, contraction — these states do not announce themselves narratively. They circulate. They pulse. They shift the weight of a shoulder, the tilt of a head, the density of pattern. The figure becomes a field rather than an outline.
While I have worked with a range of materials over the years, my current practice centers on wallpaper. A material designed to recede into the background of domestic space, wallpaper quietly shapes interior atmosphere through repetition and pattern. In removing it from the wall and cutting into its surface, I interrupt its intended function. What was meant to be decorative becomes structural. Repetition becomes rhythm. Pattern becomes breath. Wallpaper carries the residue of lived interior space — memory embedded in surface. Fragmented and reassembled, it becomes an active field that holds tension, density, and movement.
Across my practice, I return to one inquiry: How does a body hold emotional complexity without collapsing into story? How can an image embody current — the sense of something moving through rather than being fixed?
My process is intuitive and accumulative. I build until the piece begins to feel inhabited — when surface, structure, and sensation align. The finished work is not a depiction of experience but a constructed space where experience can be felt.
Each piece is an architecture of embodied current.
Biography
Sara Lisch is a San Francisco Bay Area artist whose work explores inner states, personal mythology, and moments of becoming. Born in Sechelt, British Columbia, she grew up in a creatively charged family and developed an intuitive, symbolic visual language early on.
She studied ceramics, drawing, and painting at The Evergreen State College and spent eight years living off the grid in rural Washington, rebuilding a home by hand and firing sculptures in an old gas kiln. Those years continue to inform her material sensitivity and patient, layered approach to making.
Today, she works in layered hand-cut paper and paint on panel, creating figurative works that explore transformation, resilience, and the space where the seen meets the felt. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Flint Institute of Arts (MI), Fuller Craft Museum (MA), William Traver Gallery (WA), and Santa Fe Clay (NM).
She is an Associate Member of Mercury 20 Gallery and the Founder and Curator of Cedar Street Gallery in Berkeley, California.
CV:
Selected Museum & Juried Exhibitions
2025 — Making Her Mark, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
2025 — A Generous Kingdom, Petaluma Arts Center, Petaluma, CA
2025 — National Juried Exhibition, Arc Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2025 — Verum Ultimum Juried Exhibition, Portland, OR
2016 — Function, Form and Fantasy, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
2008 — Cats, Santa Fe Clay, Santa Fe, NM
Additional exhibitions include Fuller Craft Museum (MA), William Traver Gallery (WA/IL), and the Society of Arts and Crafts Museum (MA).
Solo Exhibitions
2024 — Muse, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2023 — Dream Garden, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2021 — Metamorphosis, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2020 — Belongings, Sara Lisch Gallery, Berkeley, CA
2020 — Forest Edge, Sara Lisch Gallery, Berkeley, CA
2019 — Interwoven, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2017 — Bite Me, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2020 — 20/20 Revision, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2020 — Dare, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2019 — Truth, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2019 — Self Portraits in the Age of the Selfie, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2019 — Go Figure, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, CA
2018 — Elevate, Adobe Art Gallery, Castro Valley, CA
2018 — Small Works Show, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2018 — Melting Point, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
2017 — 20/20 Vision, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
Curatorial Projects
2020–Present — Founder & Curator, Cedar Street Gallery, Berkeley, CA
2020 — Director, The Sara Lisch Gallery, Berkeley, CA
Publications & Press
Circle Quarterly Art Review (Fall 2024; Spring 2018)
48hills, Mary Corbin, 2021
Function, Form, and Fantasy, Janet Koplos, 2016
SFMOMA Tumblr — Boy/Girl; Whirligig
500 Figures in Clay, Vol. 2, Lark Books, 2014
Collections
Dr. Robert & Deanna Harris Burger
Diane & Sandy Besser Collection
Dale & Doug Anderson
Education
B.A., The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA