Lynette Fisher - Contemporary painter

Mandy Jakich
Sep 9
2 min read

Lynette Fisher is a contemporary painter living in Te Puna near Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty. Lynette's art practice also encompasses printmaking, drawing and assemblage.

Her work investigates themes of adoption, identity, obligation and ownership. While an underlying sense of nostalgia usually permeates her work, Lynette purposefully disrupts it to bring layered and disordered meaning to often commonplace and overlooked themes.

Lynette is such a fun person to talk to and I think you'll enjoy listening to her story and outlook on life as an artist. Lynette shares her early artistic career in graphic design, picture framing, working in an art gallery and quirky artist collaborations which led to her showing her own work after painting and drawing for most of her life.

We talk about her challenging journey with breast cancer and how this became a catalyst to leaving her job and studying art in her early forties, and we explore why she felt she needed to study alongside her art practice and what she gained from this time.

We discuss context for an artist, how boundaries can influence work, the ideas behind her work that relate to her as an adopted person, what interests her about family and memories and artist collectives. We talk about nostalgic objects and how she has brought them together into the gallery context to produce installations or assemblages and what this communicates for her.

Lynette loves to enter art awards and has been a finalist many times in various NZ awards such as the Molly Morpeth Canaday, Parkin Drawing prize and the Adam Portrait award. She talks about why she enters these awards and what she gains from the process.