“Do what you know
to find out what you
don’t know.”
Lezlie Tilley is an artist who has a clear understanding of her process, influences and the ideas that underpin her practice. She has been a practising artist, educator and mentor for more than forty years. This writing is informed by a conversation with the artist in her home studio based in Newcastle, New South Wales, in April 2025.
The crossword was something Tilley remembers being taught to her by her maternal Grandmother. The new skill was a foundational experience; there before her was the puzzle of the grid in all its playfulness and profundity. Grid across – in five letters: frame; in six: matrix; in seven: network; in eight: filigree; in nine: framework; and in eleven: electricity! Through all its permutations the grid is central to Tilley’s practice, the defining motif which recurs across her oeuvre. She says “return to what you know.” For Tilley, this is the grid.
The grid is emblematic of Modernism and abstraction in the twentieth century. Used by artists to represent the infinite or to provide a scaffold for order, its cruciform shape, according to Rosalind E Krauss (1978), is a pandora’s box of spiritual references. On their opacity Krauss refers to Mondrian’s grids; are they a section of an implied continuity, or a structured and autonomous whole? Understanding its capacity for complexity whilst defying its mathematical precision, Tilley has loosely drawn the grid across the surface of the works for her upcoming exhibition at Straitjacket, NSW. The small discrepancies in the measure of the intersecting lines is a nod to a reverence for the handmade. Returning to her process of methodical drawing and repetition there is order and symmetry, meditation and concentration, presence and calm. The irregular ruled network of lines creates a shifting dancing surface where the optics generate dissonance, tension and movement.
Lezlie Tilley, Yma sumac – how beautiful, 2025, acrylic on aluminium composite panel, 90 × 68cm. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
Whilst her influences include Victor Vasarely (1906–1997), Op Art (1960s–) and Agnes Martin (1912–2004), comparisons could also be drawn with Yayoi Kusama currently on exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. For Kusama it’s dots, for Tilley the matrix, they are visually opposing yet similarly boundless and equally repeated. Kusama’s pop art aesthetic, her use of bright colours, repetition of motif, pattern making and play, to her musings on infinity, resonate across the images Tilley has created. To quote Agnes Martin (Fer 2005), “Look between the rain, the drops are insular.” In the work of both artists there is an exploration of the poetry in the micro to the infinite. In broader terms the stirrings of an idea which is shaped by imagination.
Born in 1949, Tilley has an extensive education in the visual arts across mediums such as drawing, painting and ceramics, beginning at the National Art School, later Newcastle Art School, and subsequently completing a Bachelor’s degree in visual arts. From the early 2000s, Tilley was represented by Brenda May Gallery in Sydney and is currently represented by Straitjacket in Newcastle. Her awards include the Von Bertouch Gallery prize and twice winner of both the Muswellbrook Art Prize and the Gosford Art Prize. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, and her work is in national and international private and public collections including Newcastle Art Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and MACyapang.
Lezlie Tilley in her studio with Vessels. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
To quote Jill Stowell (2017), “Here is an artist consistently using formidable skills in many mediums to create artworks that subvert our expectations; simultaneously warm and cool, intellectual and deeply felt, perfectly original but invoking the paradigms of the past.” For her new body of work she has created relief sculptures, borrowing the silhouette of Moche (100–800AD) ceramic vessels now mass produced. They become the temporal home for carrying her message. Like concrete poetry the vessels hold, fill up, carry, support, withstand – they speak to daily life. Known as stirrup vessels, where the stirrup is the looping handle, the shapes range from human heads to effigies of animals such as rabbits and goats. In these works the silhouette of the form provides a narrative element to the ephemerality of the grid. Their original sources are anthropomorphic, here writ large, they are exaggerated and energetic, interacting with the viewer like a pop song. These are bright lively objects their fluoro borders like flickering electricity.
Tilley is animated when talking about her process and ideas, with arms outstretched she proclaims the grid is expansive, it can go on forever and it is everywhere and in everything. Her daily routine – post completion of the crossword – involves working in her home studio, through the process of making and experimentation she can channel her imagination. In repetition there is discovery. It can also be grounding. She is self-described as a pattern maker – creating filigree. She says, “Do what you know to find out what you don’t know.”
Vessels, new work by Lezlie Tilley, is on view at Straitjacket, New South Wales, from 24 May to 15 June 2025.
@lezlietilley
straitjacket.com.au
Madeleine K Snow is a Curator, Writer, Educator and Art Historian based in Newcastle. Madeleine has been published in Artist Profile magazine, Arts Hub and Australian Journal of Ceramics.
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, June 2025 issue, pp. 27–29
