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Lisa Jahovic

artist
Lisa Jahovic (b. 1985) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, film, and photography. Her practice is grounded in anthropomorphism, casting everyday objects as protagonists to animate the inanimate and generate subtle, often poetic narratives. Through a performative approach to image-making, she transforms the mundane into charged symbolic forms, creating unexpected dialogues around memory, identity, and perception.

Her recent solo presentations include Soft Interruptions (2026) and The Third Drawer (2024), both at Flowers Gallery, alongside participation in Photo London and Paris Photo (2024). She published her monograph A Map of Absences with M Books, launched at Unseen Amsterdam (2023). Her work has been featured in The Guardian, British Vogue, The Observer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Le Monde, Wallpaper*, AnOther Magazine, and L’Œil de la Photographie.

Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something — and did you understand at the time what it was actually about?

I remember building a volcano at school when I was about seven, melting down boxes of old crayons the teachers were throwing away over the course of a week. I didn’t understand why I was so obsessed with making it at the time, but I still remember the strange sweet smell of melted wax –  even now it triggers this intense feeling of joy and recognition. Looking back, I think it was my first experience of transforming something discarded into something alive.

Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a conversation — and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?

It’s often an idea or an interaction.  It always begins as an experiment, something developed through play, consideration, and a willingness to follow a thought somewhere unexpected.

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Describe your studio to us — what does it look like right now, and what does it say about you?

Light filled, snug, chaotic, where Sashimi my goldfish lives. That I could be more organised I should think.

Are there elements of your process that are non-negotiable — a particular material, a gesture, a ritual? What is it, and what would be lost without it?

I need materials to misbehave a little – waltz, collapse, resist me. I tend to work intuitively with recurring objects and symbols from around me: spoons, chairs, kettles, eggs. I’m always looking for a kind of poetry in ordinary things, because without that physical familiarity and friction, the work loses its tension.

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What cultural moment — a film, a show, a performance, a record, a book, a place — genuinely changed something in you?

Eraserhead – Lynch. The Master and Margarita – Bulgakov. Showed me how the absurd, the magical and the deeply human could all exist in the same breath.

When did you last make something that surprised you — and did you trust it?

Quite often – usually when I stop trying to control the work too much and let materials or objects dictate their own logic a bit.

If someone who knew nothing about art walked into your show, what would you want them to walk out with?

A slightly altered relationship to the things they encounter every day. I’d love for them to leave looking at a spoon, a chair, or a kettle with a little more curiosity than before. Not necessarily with answers, but with a sense that the ordinary is stranger, more poetic, and more alive than it first appears.

What images or objects have just always been around — things you’ve carried with you, kept on a wall, refused to throw out? What makes them feel like home?

Home, for me, is less spatial, more a collection of objects quietly performing themselves day after day. I like objects that have absorbed time  – worn handles, dents, stains, traces of use.  I’ve always found it strangely difficult to throw away shoes. I tend to love them more as they age, when they begin to develop their own character through wear. They become less like possessions and more like portraits.