The islands appear without warning, an archipelago drifting just beyond the edge of the map, where geography begins to blur into memory.
They exist somewhere between what we have seen, what we think we remember, and what might have been invented along the way. Like the mind itself, these islands are layered, flexible, and happily unconcerned with staying put.
Explorers who wander into these waters quickly learn that navigation is more suggestion than rule. What seems familiar on first approach may quietly rearrange itself on the next visit. Landmarks shift, horizons misbehave, and orientation relies as much on instinct as on eyesight. These imagined geographies mirror the way memory works, not as a fixed archive, but as something fluid, selective, and occasionally prone to embellishment.
In Isles of Mind, she mixes and matches fragments of landscape like pieces from different puzzles. Each island is built from real places, drawn from different locations or moments in time, yet combined into something new. They feel recognizable, but not entirely trustworthy. Their composited nature reflects memory itself: a collage of impressions, omissions, substitutions, and the occasional creative leap.
Rather than hiding the seams where images meet, she chooses to reveal them. They act like visual fault lines, points of friction and connection where one place slips into another. They hint at moments where histories overlap, disagree, or unexpectedly align. Viewers are invited to linger and embrace the uncertainty, considering how places are remembered, reinvented, and gently reshaped over time.
Isles of Mind is part of a larger body of work entitled Merged Landscapes: New Lands, inspired by early stereoscope cards. These cards present two nearly identical images side by side, intended to merge into a three-dimensional scene when viewed through a stereoscope. The slight misalignment between the images suggests a glitch in time, a moment split, repeated, and reassembled.
In this work, she echoes that stereoscopic idea by merging two or more landscapes into a single continuous image. The paired scenes may be separated by great distances or decades, or they may simply capture the same place from a different vantage point, moments apart. These overlapping moments never actually coexisted, yet they feel intuitively connected. Much like memory, the landscapes are unstable, fragmented, and reconfigured into something that is both familiar and pleasantly unreliable.
By pairing images that are similar but not quite the same, the landscapes enter into a kind of visual conversation. Shapes and shadows respond to one another, suggesting new, hybrid terrains. These drifting archipelagos are neither fully real nor entirely imagined. Instead, they exist as speculative spaces, alternate geographies shaped by perception, curiosity, and the quiet pleasure of seeing something almost, but not quite, align.
About Lisa Cassell-Arms
Lisa Cassell-Arms is an American fine art photographer focused on capturing the wonder and beauty of the natural world and our changing relationship with it. By combining and merging images from different times and locations, she reinterprets the landscape and explores our perceptions of natural space. Her work centers on finding significance and commonality through heightened attention to the often unseen connections in nature that surround us every day. By bringing together disparate landscapes, she reveals unexpected continuities and shared visual rhythms, suggesting that even distant environments may be linked by form, light, or emotional resonance.
In addition to digital photographic processes, Lisa also works with the alternative process of photogravure, using handmade papers to enhance textural detail and create emotional depth.
Lisa holds a degree in film from New York University and has studied at the International Center for Photography and the Griffin Museum. Her work has been published, collected, and exhibited in galleries in the United States and internationally. [Official Website]
