Bio
Lisa Call is a contemporary textile artist based on the Kāpiti Coast in Aotearoa New Zealand. She relocated from the American Southwest in 2015. In 2025 she established a second studio in Denver, Colorado, where she works for concentrated periods of studio time each year.
Call exhibits internationally in New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions including a 2024 exhibition in Sitges, Spain, and a 2022 two-person exhibition at the Taupō Museum in Taupō New Zealand. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art in Massachusetts and The Mint Museum in North Carolina. She is a four-time exhibitor at Quilt National, one of the leading international exhibitions of contemporary textile art.
Her work is held in public and private collections including University Hospitals Cleveland and the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Highly Commended award at the 2022 Parkin Drawing Prize and was the 2025 Wellington Regional Winner of the Art Aotearoa Gold Award.
Call previously worked in technology and holds a master’s degree in computer science, a background that informs her longstanding interest in pattern and structure.
Call also teaches art workshops and offers coaching for artists. Learn more at Make Big Art.
Artist Statement
Lisa Call creates large-scale abstract textile paintings that explore how we organize experience while balancing order and uncertainty. Pattern is her primary language. Grids, pathways, and layered marks form geometric structures that reference memory, boundaries, and connection.
Working with hand-dyed fabrics, she cuts shapes and arranges them into geometric compositions, then builds the surface through dense stitching. Stitch functions both as structure and as drawing, creating layered surfaces that partially obscure the underlying forms.
The slow processes of dyeing, constructing, and stitching create a deliberate rhythm that contrasts with the speed and fragmentation of contemporary life.
Having grown up in the American Southwest and now living on the Kāpiti Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand, Call remains attentive to space, both physical and psychological. Her work draws on textile traditions while engaging with contemporary abstraction.