Lora Mathis

Instagram: lora__mathis

Website: http://Loramathis.com

Bio: Lora Mathis is a poet, artist, and writer. She makes use of a variety of mediums including text, sculpture, photography, painting, and time-based art. They are interested in making as a way to dig into humor, depth of feelings, and personal symbology. Since 2014, Mathis has performed poetry solo and alongside collaborators, including musicians Matty Terrones, the HIRS. Collective, and choreographer Angel Acuña. She is the author of The Snakes Came Back (Metatron, 2023), Here I Am In It (Burn All Books, 2021), and The Women Widowed to Themselves (Party Trick Press, 2020). Her visual work has been presented at MRKT Gallery (San Francisco, 2024), Sunday (Los Angeles, 2015), Junior High (Los Angeles, 2016), Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh, 2017), Ship in the Woods (Escondido, 2019), Swish Projects (San Diego, 2021), and more. She lives in Oakland and frequently works between there and San Diego.

Statement: Lora Mathis is interested in memory as an excavation, as well as an active layering on. Tracing organic forms through additive sculpture, their work looks at rot and shadows. The threads and torn-apart nylons they use speak to the nonlinearity of healing, which they see as similar to untangling a ball of thread. Stars and disembodied lines of poetry push through holes in the fabric, and act as reminders of strength. Leaves and melted candles offer glimpses of magic. Mathis is as interested in the shadowy depths of inner worlds, as they are in branching outward into a larger realm of collective dreaming. They let the interplay of these worlds live in the work’s material build-up.