"Lori Field crafts exquisite and wondrous worlds, dreamy yet unsettling, floating somewhere between Alice's looking glass and the Brothers Grimm's darkest forest. Here, part-creature, part-humans, nearly all tattooed, coexist among flowers, baubles, butterflies, and lace. Whether they are masked, or true hybrids with twin kitty heads or antlers springing from their hair, they are nearly all female, their attendant mystiques running the gamut from sugar-and-spice to the huntress Diana and the temptress Eve. While well grounded in the history of art—Bosch, Raphael, and Redon come immediately to mind—Field's paintings are refreshingly defiant of tradition, in a world of their own."
Barry Blinderman, Director of University Galleries of Illinois State University
My mixed media drawings, paintings and sculptures straddle a border between reality and dream, past life and present. They evoke subliminal, mysterious worlds - planets of my own creation, demimondes peopled with anthropomorphic ‘angels with attitude’, accompanied by mutants, exhibitionists, seducers, chimeras........and other intimate strangers.
Submitting to an obsession with obsessiveness, and exploring and visualizing the concept of ‘the other’, the work is deliberately intimate, containing fetishistic figures that are emotionally confrontational and exaggerated in their ‘otherness’.
Symbolism remains far more felt than understood, more disquieting than soothing. In these primitive visual myths of their secret lives, animalistic figures provide a means for emotive personification, characterizing or exhibiting human motives and foibles, with external traits suggesting internal ones.
These shape-shifting archetypes - a cast of reoccurring characters - create intuitive narratives that explore themes of loss, rebirth, identity, denial, alienation, loneliness......and vulnerability. Set in their evolving mythological context my ‘creatures’ seduce, and their peculiar environments are redolent of a flawed, human fragility.
Drawing and embroidering tattoos on the bodies, as metaphor for memory, suggests an assimilation of culturally inscribed messages. By playing with my own fairy tales and folklore - by personalizing obsessive symbols and visual language - the work helps me process my own reactions to the real world and the actual events shaping it.