Lisa Cirenza
La Clusaz
Multimedia artist, exploring the delicate dynamics of human relationships and our energetic bonds with the natural world.
Message
Lisa is an artist whose work explores connections and energies between people, place, and the natural environment. Her practice is shaped by an uncommon synthesis of art and science, grounded in early training as an earth scientist.
Awarded a National Science Foundation scholarship at the age of 17, Lisa joined a glaciological research expedition on the Juneau Icefields in Alaska, where she spent two summers traversing glaciers while drawing and documenting their geological and climatological histories. This experience culminated in The Power of Ice, a publication she co-authored to inspire young scientists, and it continues to inform her sensitivity to landscape, material, and change.
At Stanford University, Lisa pursued both scientific and artistic inquiry, studying in Paris at L’École des Mines and Sciences Po while immersing herself in museums and painting. This dual engagement continued throughout her professional life as a financial analyst and management consultant in New York, alongside sustained artistic training.
Living and working across New York, Silicon Valley, London, Tokyo, Quebec, and now the French Alps, Lisa has studied widely, including Sumi-e in Tokyo; drawing and painting at Central Saint Martins and the Royal Drawing School in London; and traditional oil techniques at the Jean-Pierre Brazs Atelier in Paris. Residencies in Cuba, California, Kyoto, and the Tyrolean Alps further shaped her evolving practice.
Her earlier series, including London Tube, City Contrasts, and Moments, examined proximity, shared experience, and urban rhythms. Her current work, developed in the French Alps, turns toward the natural environment, using encaustic to explore perception, light, and the fragility of our connection to place. Wax, pigment, and heat demand slowness and physical presence, echoing the ecological and perceptual concerns at the core of her work.
Lisa has exhibited internationally, including at Art Basel Miami, the Venice Biennale, and the Paris Salons, and her work is held in corporate, state, and private collections worldwide. She is also deeply committed to widening access to the arts, regularly working pro bono with refugees, underserved schools, and vulnerable communities.
Statement
My work explores connection — not as something guaranteed by proximity or technology, but as an act of attention in an increasingly fragmented world.
My path has been cyclical. Trained originally as an earth scientist, I moved through oil painting, digital painting, and urban observation before returning to a more elemental engagement with material and place. A recent move from London to the mountains of France marked a further turning point, drawing my practice back toward questions of environment, perception, and presence.
I continue to work digitally as a way of capturing fleeting moments, gestures, and shifts of light, often en plein air. Yet I am increasingly aware of how technology, while connective in promise, can also distance us — pulling attention away from the physical world and into algorithmic loops that flatten experience.
The encaustic works emerge as a response to this tension. Wax, pigment, heat, and gravity insist on slowness and physical engagement. Through layering, veiling, and erasure, forms appear and dissolve, echoing the way perception itself unfolds. Light is not depicted as subject, but approached as an interior and perceptual state — something that moves, pauses, and plays at the edge of visibility.
The rugged landscape that now surrounds me calls for materials that are visceral and resistant. These works ask for sustained attention, offering connection not through immediacy, but through presence. In a time of acceleration and dislocation, they propose looking — carefully, patiently — as a quiet but necessary act.