Atelier OPEN: Meet the Artist Lior Locher
Our Atelier OPEN exhibition continues at our contemporary art gallery on Brighton Beach, and we've invited some our exhibiting artists to tell us a bit more about themselves and their work. With 150 exhibitors, we might not get to hear from them all...
Today we hear from collage artist, Lior Locher.
I’m Lior Locher (they/she), I started making art in earnest as a crazy pandemic challenge to make 44 pieces for my 44th birthday and to show up with them.
Pieces started selling and getting into exhibitions and magazines. Art is now a big part of my life. After having lived in six countries on four continents and being briefly homeless at some point, my home is now at the Great British Seaside.
I am fascinated by people’s inner lives and how we make sense of our own inner journeys as humans. Our lives are always a way of picking up what there already is and recombining it, adding our own flavour. Ripping things up and starting again. Sedimentation and layers that form over time and space. Everything is good for something and nothing is wasted. That applies to life and art, and mixed media collages are great for exploring that.
My piece in the Atelier OPEN is called A Day Out and captures the excitement and energy when you burst out of your day to day into a fun day out on the weekend where life is zestier and more colourful. I love traveling by train and how the landscape blurs into texture when you look out a train window. The piece starts as a mixed media collage with travel ephemera and has a card collagraph print on top.
I love traveling and spent a good chunk of spring this year experimenting with travel ephemera collages and printing different train views and other travel-related iconography on top in bright colours.
City maps, tickets and other ephemera and interesting paper form a key part of my “input stash” and I’m always on the lookout. I also use a lot of my own abstract paintings and experiments as basis for collages too. Simple, logo-esque sketches turn into linocuts or card collagraphs that add focus and another layer of markmaking and colour. Each outcome is unique.
I get a lot of inspiration right now from quilt and collage artists like Bisa Butler and Gio Swaby, but also from some of the Dada work from the 1920s like Hannah Höch, from the way Julie Mehretu uses layers in her work and from how Peter Cook approaches spaces.
I didn't go to art school. I've been to a few evening and weekend classes, and am largely self-taught. Started making art in earnest and showing up with in my 40s.
I have a portfolio career, a few days of “day job”, some freelancing and making art. I always make time for making and experiencing art.
I have one tiny little table where I eat, do my day job/work and also make art. That is why the formats are fairly small right now and I can only use materials that don’t smell and dry quickly. I go to Lawrence Print Club to use the print studio equipment for the printmaking part of my practice.
This is my second time exhibiting in the Atelier OPEN. In the past 12 months I have started showing work in a few open call exhibitions and fairs in the UK and US. The most touching experience was a project called “Stick with Kyiv” where collage artists from all around the world sent pieces to Kyiv that then got assembled into bigger street art displays all around the city.
My work gets a fair bit of traction with American literary magazines who clearly love my art much more than my writing… I’ve been in 9 magazines so far.
I just did a cartography commission with Colossive Press about the legend of the Golem, generative AI and the limits of human creation.
My Desert Island Artwork would be Hieronymus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights. I once saw it live and feel like I could spend a lifetime exploring all the weird and wonderful details.
If you'd like to see more of my work, my day to day experiments are on Instagram. My website has a bigger selection of works, more background and also some of my writing here.
Come and visit the Atelier OPEN for yourself. We've extended the closing date, so you can vote for favourite piece in our People's Choice Prize until 17th September.
Atelier Beside the Sea is on Brighton Beach, 165 Kings Road Arches BN1 1NB, and open every day from 11am - 5pm. If you can't make it to the gallery yourself, you can view the whole exhibition online.
