In our era of manifestation – the aim to make things happen by sheer desire alone – Lila Roo’s words are worth living by. “With enough energy and vision, anyone can transform,” she begins. Although rooted in natural growth, this ability is nothing short of supernatural. “What allures me about transformation is the agency you have over your own life, circumstances and resources,” she continues. “When you transform something,” she pauses: “you are literally tapping into magic.”
Roo’s been spellbound her entire life. The daughter of acclaimed artist Tom Lieber, known for his abstract spatial paintings, and prison activist and poet Betsy Duncombe, she was nurtured in a fiercely creative environment, with art and activism considered equal to basic human needs. “I grew up with creativity as the foundation of my life, sometimes in the form of art-making and sometimes in the form of problem-solving,” she remembers. “It’s definitely a basic need, close to water and food! The highest form of gratitude for my life is to be creative.”
Living nomadically around the globe, Roo started to showcase her art in 2008, exhibiting her work everywhere from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Abu Dhabi to Rio de Janeiro. For the last nine years, she’s settled in Bequia, a seven-square-mile island in the Grenadines. It’s where she calls me from, it’s healing energy seeming to lilt towards me through her microphone, reverberating in my ears as she explains Bequia’s unique verve.
“The place is very hot, beautiful, isolated,” she says. Her words don’t just talk of transformation but are themselves transportive, taking me to the Grenadines of the present but also to the island’s past suffering. “Bequia has a painful history of colonialism. The regal-ness, dignity and high spirit of the people despite this continued history blows me away. Despite the many systemic struggles carried over from imperialistic colonialism, there is a lot of play.” It’s now home: “I fell in love down here, gave birth to my son down here, have been through volcanic eruptions, really the biggest experiences of my life… Bequia continues to shape me deeply.”
While the island’s mosaic of oases, elysian beaches and turquoise waters might be the selling points for luxury travel agents and sun-seekers alike, it’s the local people that keep Roo enchanted. “The people are what I love about my island home. Island life is full of resourceful people, who find creative ways to make things happen.”
Roo seems far too humble to include herself in this, but her compelling resourcefulness is of equal measure. Rather than using the island’s bountiful natural resources, she uses its unnatural refuse: plastic. Combing the island for cast-off, man-made debris, she braids and binds what she finds into new forms, crafting suspended-disbelief wall sculptures and majestic wearable art.
Plastic, it turns out, isn’t a happy medium. “I find discarded plastic repulsive, and yet I think the fact that we as a society hide it so well is even more repulsive,” she explains. Her work allows her to confront the very tangible effects of global consumerism first-hand: “Most people have no idea how much plastic waste we as people generate because we hide it in landfills and in our oceans. I feel like I have a very honest view of human consumption because I seek it out.”
For Roo, the psychological transformation that takes place between plastic being seen as something positive and something negative is solely based on its usefulness. “Plastic only seems to bother us when it’s discarded, but it’s production also exploits cheap labor, and the earth’s resources, whether it’s thrown away or not,” she explains. “I am worried that people aren’t aware enough of their overall consumption of all things, and focus on such specific products – and that’s dangerous.”
While plastics may repel her at all levels, Roo alchemises their garish, unsightly manifestations into sheer beauty. This tension between waste and wonder is what fuels her practice: “I do think my work holds a duality in it, the beauty of the forms, colours, textures and the harshness and story of the raw material itself,” she explains. “I think that’s what makes my physical art pieces so alluring, that simultaneous push and pull. I have always been drawn to contrast in life and work.”
Another of her objects is equally repellent for many of us: the snake. Serpentine forms are seen throughout her work, from the winding braids she repeatedly returns to, to the notion of transformation that energises her entire portfolio. “Snakes are so full of contrast, they excite, entice and scare us,” she says. “Their skins are a small physical remnant of that energy, but something we can hold or own more easily than the snake itself. By the time my work ever hangs on a white wall, it has seen a lot, and been through many real life transformations.”
Serpents form the inspiration for her Snakeskin series, seeing her weave plastic into the moulted top layers of the animal kingdom’s slyest shapeshifters. “[My work] is almost like an animal skin: you sense the life lived and feel the presence when looking at one,” she explains. “Like the old skin of a snake, plastic is the skin we as a human species shed so often, onto the ground, as we consume more and more. I guess you could say these braided pieces are skins I am creating, then shedding through the process of being a human and an artist.”
As with any process of transformation, there are byproducts. The first is the positive environmental impact of her work; her practice, in a small way, helps to clean up the island. “I could never collect enough plastics to clean up the world, but if I can change its form, from something worthless to something valued, then I feel I have done my best as a human,” she says.
The second by-product is something ineffable; a kind of mysterious, awesome, unutterable energy that Roo’s work exudes, just as hard for her to capture as those engaging with her art for the first time. “I think energy is something personal and felt – hard to explain,” she says. “I hope my art makes people feel wonder, and sense power, like when you see something elusive in nature.”
Some of the energy comes from within the onlooker, Roo’s art acting as an agent to bring it into being. “With my performances and portraits of other people, I am eliciting, helping to bring out something that is already in them, something hidden by day to day functioning,” she says. “It’s electrifying for everyone involved to feel.” This uncanny feeling can be overwhelming: “My husband, who is in the photograph here in this feature, says what people see in his photo reflects who they are: The energy is so strong it makes people have to tap in or get out. For those who choose to tap in rather than turn away, magic awaits.
Nearing the end of our discussion, Roo returns to the nature of Bequia. “Our lives depend on the very tangible natural elements and people value their resources,” she explains. “An example of this is: all our water comes from rain catchment so if it doesn’t rain, we don’t have any water to use.”
As we say goodbye and I return with a thud of my touchpad back to a more mundane reality, I wonder what if, in some sort of utopia, there’s no more plastic on the island for Roo to use. I’m reminded, though, that her current practice is as much an act of environmentalism as it is a chosen medium; plastic just a temporary manifestation of her own endless resourcefulness. Like the skin-shedding snakes that inform her work, her art would effortlessly morph into a new form, a constant reminder that transformation is possible: that magic exists to those who believe in it.
