Lisa Sorgini (b. 1980, Adelaide, Australia) is a practising photographic artist currently based in Northern New South Wales (Bundjalung Country) Australia. Lisas work is focused towards the maternal experience, the relationship between mother and child, ties to family and community and addressing the societal constructs and expectations that are vastly at odds with the lived experience of most mothers.
Her own experiences directly inform the themes in her work and as the mother of two young sons and a step daughter she has built a large body of work around the exploration of her own motherhood experience and familial space. Growing up in a largely fractured and sometimes destructive family unit and losing her mother to cancer months after the birth of her first son she is sensitive to the actuality that nurturing and deep love can exist alongside generational trauma and pain. She is deeply interested in the way our familial relationships, particularly the mother role looks and changes over time and the layers of emotional landscape that exist beneath the surface.
Working with natural light in both film and digital format she creates portraits and landscapes that are unguarded and sensitive, tense and tender, with rich textures and a painterly aesthetic . Composing her images at angles that create anonymity and using unconventional crops further convey subtle nuances between her and her subjects, teasing out a wider dialogue and allowing personal experience to shape its final interpretation to the individual viewer.
She has most recently been selected as a finalist in the 2020 CLIP Award and Australia Photography Awards (Stories) in 2019 Olive Cotton and Iris Awards, and as a semi-finalist in the Head On Portrait Prize (2020 , 2019) and Moran Portrait Prize (2016).
Her work has been exhibited within Australia and internationally and published extensively, with recent notable interviews in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, Creative Review and National Geographic.
