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Lisa Brawn is a Calgary based artist specializing in painted woodcut blocks. Her work is in public collections such as The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Civic Art Collection, and The University of Lethbridge collection, as well as in private collections across Canada, Europe, and the United States. Her work has been featured on banners for Calgary Bridges, Calgary Parks, and Fort Calgary, and there is a large scale permanent installation of her woodblocks at Inglewood’s Festival Hall.
In her multi-decade career as a professional artist, Lisa has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 40 group exhibitions from Victoria, Seattle and Los Angeles, to Halifax, Chicago and New Orleans. She received international attention for her large scale interactive, solar-powered sculptural installation, Helios, at the Leighton Art Centre, which was featured on CBC’s As It Happens, and picked up by media outlets from Canada to Brazil.
A major component of Lisa’s art practice has been exploring the possibilities for alternative art venues and project spaces. Starting in 2001, her artmobile in a 1935 vintage travel trailer was followed by an art salon in Calgary’s Grain Exchange building. Lisa then collaborated with Milo Dlouhy and Angela Inglis to transform a downtown warehouse into an artist-run gallery and Museum of Oddities. In 2007 Brawn, Dlouhy, and Inglis collaborated on a storefront museum in Art Central, and in 2009 and 2010, Brawn and Inglis collaborated with Jane Grace on an interdisciplinary project space in a hundred year old cottage. In 2009 Brawn transformed a 1962 Airstream into a second mobile gallery, The Bambi Media Machine, which was featured in the film “I Liked You Better Before” directed by Michal Lavi. From 2007 to 2012, Lisa curated a window gallery with Inglis and Grace, known as La Fenêtre.
I am a Calgary-based artist working primarily in painted woodcarving and experimental public art. For more than twenty five years, I have developed a distinctive approach to carving and painting wood, first introduced to the medium by printmakers at the Alberta College of Art and Design (now AUArts). Rather than making prints, I work directly with the carved blocks as finished artworks, combining the graphic language of woodcut printmaking with saturated colour and maximalist surfaces.
Humour, parody, popular culture, and the absurd are recurring interests in my work. Over the years, I have developed multiple figurative and portrait series, including ¿Quién es más macho?, Topical Ointment, Sideshow, Festival of Wrongheadedness, Take Me to Your Leader, and Honky Tonkin’ Honey, Baby. These works explore cultural mythology, notoriety and idolatry, gender stereotypes, vanity, and the peculiar theatre of human behaviour.
My ongoing series POP Apocalypse began in 2021 with curved oak theatre seatbacks salvaged from the renovation of Calgary’s Martha Cohen Theatre. What started as an experiment with unusual reclaimed material has grown into an expansive collection of Pop imagery: divas, himbos, wildcats, extravagant botanicals, surveillance clouds, flying snakes, absurdist signage, and furious chihuahuas. The series embraces maximalism, theatricality, and dark humour, finding comedy and beauty in an increasingly surreal social, political, and environmental landscape. In September 2026, I presented new work from the series Cringe Queen in the Jacuzzi, at an exhibition with Mandy Stobo and Chad Saunders at Ruberto Ostberg Gallery in Calgary.
Alongside my figurative work, I have carved more than two thousand studies of wild birds and woodland creatures, working with reclaimed and upcycled wood. These pieces juxtapose natural forms with damask, geometric, and katagami-inspired patterns. The resulting interplay between observation and ornament reflects my interest in the chaotic beauty of nature and the controlled beauty of design.
My practice has also extended beyond the studio. Over several decades, I have initiated and collaborated on experimental artist-run spaces, exhibition venues, art salons, mobile galleries, and unconventional public art projects. In 2013, my Pophouse project brought original art to the exteriors of private residences in Calgary. In 2018, I completed a series of one hundred portraits referencing anonymous mid-century photobooth self-portraits by women. In 2019, I transformed a teak street-food pushcart into CART Blanche, a mobile free art dispensary on Calgary’s RiverWalk, distributing original small-scale works on paper.
I am interested in the intersection of high and low culture, the decorative and the subversive, sincerity and satire. I believe art belongs in everyday life, in unexpected places, and in the shared experience of our communities. Above all, I remain committed to experimentation, curiosity, and surprise.
