How Do You Build a Body of Work?

Hello Reader,

Last year, I made a decision that's still pushing back against me.

In 2025, I chose not to apply for any exhibitions for 2026. No open calls. No submissions. Only residency applications for 2027. And even though it's been hard to stay faithful to that choice, because I don’t know about you, but when I see the shiny thing glinting over there, a part of you wants to chase it. But first, I had to commit to making a solid body of work. Not scattered pieces. Not experiments that feel finished before they're actually coherent. A body of work that says something because it was built intentionally, not assembled from whatever was ready.

So I traded the application submissions for studio time.

And now I'm in the middle of figuring out what it actually takes to do this.

Here's what I'm working with right now.

Three things are circling in my practice, and I'm trying to figure out how they land together. Paper in particularly, I'm taking it further than I did before. I made the tree and wisteria base in papier-mâché for Arts in Bloom, and I want to push that into full sculptures. How can I manipulate paper the way you manipulate clay? How can it hold form and intention at that scale? I'm also making paper pulp paintings, which opens up a completely different conversation about what paper can be.

Then there's cotton. I want to work with Black cotton farmers to source the fibers for my papermaking process, which feels important to mention. The material carries a specific meaning. And I'm asking: what does it mean to work with cotton intentionally, knowing its history?

And then there’s the color blue. Specifically indigo. The indigo plant, where it comes from, what it's been used for, who's used it and why, and most of all, the history.

I don't have the answers yet to how these three things work together. That's actually what I’m working on right now.

The research is load-bearing.

I've spent this year researching in a way I haven't before. Black in Blue by Imani Perry opened something. It's not just about the color; it's about what blue carries in Black life, culture, and history. I discovered a potter from the eighteenth century by the name of Thomas Commeraw, who used blue in his work, and that became a breadcrumb. But here's the part that left me with wonderment: learning how the Gullah Geechee people used leftover indigo, the waste product after making, to paint their doors for protection from haints. Blue was used in Japan for warriors' armor as protection. How this color has been a shield, a ward, a keeper.

I'm trying to tell the story of blue the way I see it, the way I feel it, and the way history has actually used it. How are these three things intertwined?

That's what a body of work means to me right now. Not a series of pretty objects. A coherent argument made with materials.

So here's my question back to you.

For the artists reading this: How are you building your body of work? What are the three, five, or ten things at work in your practice right now, and are they in conversation with each other? How long are you willing to sit in the not-knowing?

And for the collectors: Are you interested in witnessing this? Not just the finished piece, but the process of building something like this? The research, the false starts, the discoveries that change everything? Would you want access to that, even while it's still forming?

I'm asking because I think there's a different kind of relationship possible here, one where you're not waiting for the object to be complete before you start paying attention. One where the building is the thing worth watching.

I'll be sharing more of this process as it unfolds, the experiments that work, the ones that don't, and what the research is teaching me. Because if this body of work is going to mean something, the people who live with it eventually should know where it came from.

From the studio with gratitude, Lisa

What's On My Shelf

Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World is Catherine McKinley's attempt to follow a color back to its roots and, underneath that, to follow herself. An adoptee born of a Black father and a Jewish mother descended from textile factory owners, raised by WASPs in an all-white New England community, McKinley encounters a piece of Yoruba indigo cloth one day and simply can't let it go. That obsession becomes the engine of the book because her ancestors were traded along the same Saharan routes as indigo, where a length of blue cotton could purchase a human life. She isn't just researching a dye. She's tracing the line between cloth and body, between beauty and the cost of beauty. ​

The book is structured as a travel memoir. She moves through Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria, through markets and dye pits and burial grounds, writing in a style heavy with poetic touches and metaphysical musings. It's not a perfect book; some critics felt it loses momentum in the second half. But for my purpose as a researcher, what matters is what McKinley is doing: using one material, one color, one obsession as a vehicle to move through history, through the body, through inheritance, through the question of what we carry without knowing we're carrying it. That's your territory.

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