Lisa Gordillo

Biography

Lisa Gordillo is an artist, writer, widow, and grief advocate. Her work explores witness, connection, comfort, and repair.

At Michigan Tech, Lisa teaches sculpture, drawing, stage design, and large-format painting. Her courses focus on community-engaged arts practices, sustainability, and encouraging students as they develop their personal arts language. 

She loves dogs, trees, and the color pink.

Creative Work: Sister Forests

Sister Forests is an international connection between forests on the island of Björkö-Arholma, Sweden and the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan. The concept is much like a “sister city,” but instead of an urban partnership, the project connects two forests and the people living among them: “sister forests.”

The project builds environmental stewardship and personal human connection with international exchanges of art, forest research, and community projects. Collaborators in Sweden and the U.S. use their different expertise to support one another.  One of the project’s core ideas is that the ways we care for our forests help us to build stronger community ties, and because of that, environmental work can lead to a more peaceful world.

The study abroad program Sustainability in Sweden is part of this project.

Creative Work: Sit with me

I’ve often been fascinated with hidden stories. I wonder about what is underneath the story we tell, what is underneath the story we accept, and why it’s underneath and not on top.

As a widow, I learned quickly on a personal level what I had often spoken about from a safer distance: that our culture is uncomfortable with difficult stories, challenging histories, things that take time. Lots and lots of time.

But when we’re storytelling, or making art, or holding space for a challenging history, or for grief, we’re holding something precious.

In grief scholarship we learn over and over that grief must be witnessed. Trauma rewires the brain and a person’s sense of their lived experience.  Witness – holding space for hard, complicated stories, being willing to sit with, is critical support.

Sit with me is a collection of art, writing, and connection-making that focuses on community, comfort, and that magical, necessary kindness called witness.