I AM APE Self Published Book

We are all apes, is artist Lisa Roet’s clarion call in I am Ape, a new monograph of her three decade career.

Roet’s striking art works explore human’s relationship with apes, drawing on the influence of zoologists, language experts and others.

Roet multidisciplinary art operates within the realms of still-life, caricature, landscape, classical sculpture and Pop art.  Prof Jeanette Horn calls Roet “one of the foremost sculptors working in Australia.”

Roet is best known for her giant inflatable sculptures that cling to iconic architecture in metropolises around the world. From Beijing to London the presence of jungle creatures – gorillas, gibbons and chimpanzees – dramatises the dire encroachment of humans on the great apes’ pristine habitats. With nowhere to run, Roet’s art provocatively suggests, the animals will soon be on our doorstep, if not climbing the walls and nesting on the roof. Environmental concerns are, however, only one facet to her conceptual project.

Aesthetically rich, diverse and complex, her work always returns to the same terrain – the great ape, human/animal relationships, the degradation of the Earth, species extinction and hope for the future. Roet has become the a major voice of the last half-century in exploring how inextricably linked human and animal are in the age of the Anthropocene.

“Using the animal to reflect the human, demystifies the human,” she says. “I’m interested in exploring that liminal state between the rational and the primal. In my work I’m always becoming the ape, or the ape is becoming me.”