Lisa Klakulak is an artist and educator living in Asheville NC. Klakulak graduated in 1997 with a BFA in Fiber Arts from Colorado State University after which she earned a Visual Arts Teaching License while an Artist-in-Residence at Tennessee Tech University’s Appalachian Center for Craft from 2002-2005. Exploring, making and teaching under the guise of STRONGFELT, Klakulak’s work has been recognized through American Craft Council and James Renwick Alliance Awards and publications, such as Fiber Arts, Surface Design Journal, Shuttle Spindle Dyepot, Fiber Art Now, American Craft and several international Felt Journals. With a reputation for technical precision and its opposite, wanderlust, her career and aesthetic have been marked by worldwide travel, conducting workshops in over a dozen countries. Having complete a Master’s Degree in Sculpture in Spring 2020, Klakulak’s recent work dials in on the correlation of concepts of space in material, social environments and the psyche.
"As a craft person, I am deeply inquisitive of natural materials; the patterning of their growth and/or accumulation, deterioration and deformation and the impact of surrounding environments including broad human actions, as well as the agency of a pair of hands. As an artist, I am fascinated by systems and interference, methodology and chance, structure, damage and repair. All encompassing of my artistic practice is an attention to the porosity of materials, the space within and between, and processes that modify that internal space. These micro-environments provoke memories of spacial relations in my lived experience.
As a sculptor, I use qualities and measures of space to allude to psychosomatic states of being. Felt, a constant in my material repertoire, implicates human experience, as it is not only able to visually convey a range of states of vulnerability depending on the density to which it has been agitated/felted, but is made of animal hair with attributes similar to our own. Hair is a record of lived experience and this skin-like substrate and processes performed upon it, are emblematic of the impacts of familial/social structures and atmospheres. I gather human-made materials that exhibit the impact of external forces, natural materials whose structure presents visual metaphors of the human condition and tools that have a designed purpose of altering and defining concepts of space for a conversation about what is felt."