Ellen Lesperance

Ellen Lesperance (born 1971) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon.

Lesperance was born in Minneapolis and raised in Seattle. She creates art in various media but often employs the visual language of knitting, having once worked for Vogue Knitting as a pattern knitter. Citing inspiration from Bauhaus-era female weavers, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and body-based feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Lesperance’s gouache paintings on paper can be followed as patterns to recreate historic knit garments. She sources these historic garments from archival images and film footage of women involved in Direct Action protest, including women from: the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, Earth First!, Occupy events, feminist-era protest events, and the feminist art canon.

She frequently displays her paintings with her hand-knit textiles, which she says she hopes will “beckon a new wearer.” Through studying activists' visual strategies, Lesperance "recognized that Creative Direct Action provides a powerful model for politically-inclined artists... but unfortunately it is creative making that exists outside the purview of contemporary art."

Additionally, Lesperance creates memorial paintings that she terms “death shrouds” for young women activists who have died while fighting for “causes greater than themselves,” including Rachel Corrie, Mia Zapata, Beth “Horehound” O’Brien,Susana Chávez, Pippa Bacca, and Helen Thomas. In 2012, Lesperance presented a solo show at Frieze Art Fair New York in which she displayed a suite of seven paintings made in the memory of slain Italian activist and artist Pippa Bacca.

...
Wikipedia