Lynn Sisler
Northampton, MA
Lynn Sisler is an American artist working in New England. Born in 1969, she received her MFA at Maine College of Art and a BFA from Northern Illinois University
Message
Lynn Sisler (b.1969, Rockford, IL, USA) earned a BFA in painting with a minor in Art History from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, and an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design in Portland, ME. The artist is represented by the Elizabeth Moss Gallery in Portland and Falmouth, ME, and had her first two-person show in this commercial gallery in 2024. She is also represented by dk Gallery in Marietta, GA. Sisler has also shown work at The Zuckerman Museum, Kennesaw, GA; Springfield College, Springfield, MA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; 13 Forest Gallery, Arlington, MA; Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA; and dk Gallery, Marietta, GA, among others. Sisler received the prestigious Hildreth Family MFA Scholar Award and the Hale Residency at the Artist Association of Nantucket. Lynn Sisler currently lives and works in western Massachusetts.
Statement
I create oil paintings that explore the symbolic relationships between animals, memory, and the natural world. My compositions center on animals interwoven with dense floral forms that blur distinctions between camouflage, ornament, and environment. These spaces feel both intimate and otherworldly, where figures emerge and dissolve within shifting fields of pattern.
My work draws from personal and collective memory, shaped by an early life immersed in animals, books, and imagined worlds. As a child, I found companionship and safety in the natural world and in stories of personified animals—experiences that continue to inform my visual language. Returning to these memories, particularly after my father’s passing, I began to understand them as sites of refuge where imagination and memory intertwine.
Animals function as carriers of meaning. Influenced by Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, I see them as archetypal forms that recur across cultures, embodying instinct, transformation, and protection. My work exists within this lineage, where the symbolic and intuitive converge, and animals act as intermediaries between inner and external worlds.
I am also influenced by Surrealism as a method of accessing the subconscious and collective memory through image-making. My process is intuitive and associative, allowing inner narratives, dreams, and inherited imagery to surface through painting.
Through repetition and pattern, I approach painting as a form of ritual—an act of incantation that engages memory, dreams, and unseen forces. The paintings evolve as open-ended narratives that resist fixed interpretation. They exist as fragments of a larger, shifting story—visual folktales shaped by memory, imagination, and emotional inheritance. Through these works, I ask: What is remembered and what is imagined? What do we carry forward, and what transforms in the process?
Ultimately, these paintings function as talismanic spaces, holding protection, vulnerability, and transformation within an uncertain and ever-changing world.