Lisa Hirmer

LISA HIRMER

Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist working in visual media, social practice, performance, and occasionally writing. She is primarily concerned with collective relationships—that which exists between things rather than simply within them— both in human communities/publics and in human relations with the more-than-human world. Her recent work looks at the forces that shape and transform human relationships with the complex ecologies that they are a part of, looking in particular for the traces left by the entangled connections between things. Lately, this work is focused on what it means to be living in a climate emergency and planetary collapse.

Hirmer's work finds a home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces. Her work has been shown in galleries across Canada and internationally including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cambridge Art Galleries, Art Gallery of Guelph, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Peninsula Arts, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory among others. Hirmer holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of Waterloo and is currently based in Guelph, Canada.

Hirmer joined the ECH community as a contributor to the April 22, 2021, online group exhibition Earth Day 2021: Stop Extinction! Restore the Earth.

Visit her website here.

EARTH DAY 2021: Stop Extinction! Restore the Earth

Lisa Hirmer, Emergency Signal, photograph, 2018

Lisa Hirmer, Emergency Signal

We—by which I mean everything living on this planet—are in an emergency. This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic began and it will be true after it ends. And as long as the climate crisis puts the planet’s capacity to support life at risk, we will continue to be in an emergency. As a generation who is unlikely to see its end, I’ve been working to make sense of what it means to be living life inside an emergency of this scale.

Unlike emergencies that are self-evident—floods, fires, earthquakes, as we now know dangerous viruses—the climate crisis has arrived slowly, is hard to see, and is felt differently by different people. Naming this emergency for what it is, is a way to start seeing it more clearly. Building emergency signals for the climate crisis is about keeping its urgency present.