Lisa Tomasetti - Paul Lacey - Photography | Painting - Friday 20 February - Sunday 8 March 2026

Not Sinking, Rising—The Venice Series

For the last few years I have been interested in creating site specific works that address environmental issues and sustainability.

With the advent of digitisation and the passing of ‘peak camera’, I’ve produced a series of photographs seeking to reaffirm the lasting power of the photographic image. In a world where present quantity seems the enemy of historic quality, the work asks if photography’s ubiquity has threatened its fixity as art? When chiaroscuro is but one of myriad digital effects, when erasure is built into the host platform’s algorithm, does the image sustain value beyond the experience of its capture?

As a photographer whose art practice has been heavily influenced by the work of the Old Masters, I recently travelled to Venice to immerse myself in its rich history of Art.

I was interested in creating a series that investigates the influence of the works of the Old Masters on contemporary art, and how this history has affected the value of photography’s digital expression.

The project continues my interpretative response to the Old Masters, whose 500 year old skills reflect expression and preservation, but enlists landscape elements to explore notions of permanence within contemporary digital photography. By placing the classically familiar figure in a threatened environment, the work questions what constitutes lasting value in art making, and whether contemporary photography risks its legacy as lasting cultural artefact?

In 2019 I travelled with my daughter to Iceland to begin this project, to capture the precarious nature of the landscape, and to comment on the fragility of the environment (threatened by climate change) versus the potential decay of the modern digital photograph.

Having been awarded an artist residency in Venice this year, I was able to further explore the concept of cultural erasure in environments of existential threat. The shifting landscape of Venice powerfully represents photography’s tectonic shift from analogue to digital, forming new alloys and new ways of seeing.

Way Over Yonder

Way Over Yonder continues on from Going Out West, painting places from my imagination often inspired by the kind of music and musicians that I find fascinating, early Bluegrass, folk & Appalation music, and musicians like Charlie Parr, Doc Bloggs and Gillian Welch.

I often used lyrics from songs, as titles, to help convey my nostalgic connection to time and place, within the visual narrative of a painting—sometimes this coincides with the song narrative, sometimes its just more poetic and apt. For instance, What The Sun Said (John Fahey), is an instrumental piece, and it is my own intuitive sensibility informing the colours, mood and language. The goat in the painting understands what the sun said, in unspoken words.

Another example is the title Ben Dewberry’s Final Run (Jimmie Rogers), a ballad of its time (1920’s American folksong) which tells the story of a brave, ill-fated train driver’s calamitous last run, it has a very playful, joyous and almost comical quality, that I love.

I’ve been using more vivid tactile paint surfaces and saturated colour harmonies in this series, that I hope resonates a seductive sense of stillness and timeless tranquillity, to escape the darkness in the current world we find ourselves in today.