Lori Field
You’re no Bunny Til Some Bunny Loves You
Written by Arlyne Berzak, MAM Docent
Lori Field's work is a commentary on our times. Most artists work with music in the background. Lori works listening to podcasts of current events and political programs as her background, and feels much of this contemporary information filters into her work.
Her objective is to entice people to enter her paintings and experience a strange beauty created by her mythological world, and talks about “going under the surface of beauty.”
Lori describes her work as “not quite surrealism—more symbolism using a symbolic system of female figures who are almost always tattooed. The tattoos are often embroidered onto her work. Her characters are designed to evoke feelings. She crafts dreamy, wonderous worlds of creatures that are part human and part animal.
Lori says, “My mixed media drawings, paintings and sculptures straddle the border between reality and dream, past life and present. They evoke subliminal, mysterious worlds: planets of my own creation peopled with anthropomorphic angels with attitude accompanied by mutants, exhibitionists, seducers, chimeras and other intimate strangers”. Her creatures “play in their worlds.”
You will often find rabbits in her work, including this work entitled You’re No Bunny Until Some Bunny Loves You. She once discovered her animal totem in Native American mythology is the rabbit. There is a tale in Native American folklore, where the rabbit who was once considered the bravest animal–through a series of events becomes the most timid. She feels this represents her
Lori borrows a lot from the mythology of cultures all over the world: Native American, Greek, Roman and Asian to name a few.
Lori works in mixed media which includes found objects, collage, and pictures embedded in encaustic. She will place a human head on an animal body and an animal head on a human body. She is skilled in a huge variety of media and crafts and combines them all. Her imagination knows no bounds.
More recently, she is concentrating on printing skills.
Field was awarded the New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship in 2004. The work on view is a 7-color plate lithograph. The background is a digital print with hand coloring on top.
Lori Field (b. 1955)
You’re no Bunny Til Some Bunny Loves You, 2004-05
Seven color lithograph with hand coloring
Ed. 33
29 ½ x 22 in.
Gift of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper
2005.5.2
