Artist Statement

I’m drawn to vibrant, layered imagery as a way of exploring societal contradiction. Working in acrylic and mixed media, I often destroy and repurpose my own paintings by cutting, reassembling, and stitching them back together using hand and machine quilting techniques my mother taught me as a household necessity. That act of breaking down and rebuilding mirrors how societies pick up the pieces in pursuit of a more hopeful future.

My work explores cultural, social, and political confinement, as well as the courage of women who challenge the prisons, self-imposed and societal, built around them. Through portraiture, storytelling, and increasingly through coded visual languages like American quilt symbols and hobo signs, I ask how we navigate division: what we signal, what we hide, and who we trust to read us correctly.

About Lisbet

Lisbet Axell is a pseudonym — a deliberate one. It exists to give the work room to be fully itself, separate from the name attached to a career spent in technology. That career has given her a close, sometimes uneasy view of how technology reshapes institutions, trust, and human behavior at scale — concerns that surface, often obliquely, throughout her work.

She comes from Norwegian-American stock — descendants who settled and have farmed the same land for over a century — a background steeped in inherited craft, including the quilting and needlework her mother taught her as a skill every woman was expected to carry into her household. Years spent traveling and living abroad — Germany, Australia, Japan, Spain, Costa Rica, and across the U.S. — deepened a fascination with how differently cultures organize themselves, and how persistently, underneath that difference, the same human instincts — toward belonging, toward signaling safety, toward survival — recur.

That tension between systems (technological, cultural, political) and the human instincts they’re built to serve, contain, or override is the through-line of her practice. She now splits her time between Rockland, Maine and Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband and dogs. Her work has been exhibited at venues including The Athenaeum, The Art League, and Falls Church Arts, earning Best in Show and Juror’s Choice honors, and is held in private collections across the U.S. and Africa.