Lisa Stonham is a visual artist based on unceded Gadigal Land. Her practice considers the potential of photography to move beyond the “decisive moment” and convey experiences that unfold over time. Exploring moments where time and space feel unsettled, recursive, and open-ended, she investigates how photography might suspend, fracture, or reconfigure temporal experience.
Working across installation and sculpture, the photograph is extended into physical space, blurring its boundaries to invite hybridisations and slippages between mediums. Exhibitions reconsider the ‘photographed’ as a continuum unfolding through embodied experience in the present - examining light, space, perception, and time as active materials that rethink the photograph as continuous and evolving.
Reconfiguring photography as a spatial and durational practice, the work considers the materiality of light, the plasticity of time, and the invisible forces that shape experience. The photograph emerges not as a fixed record of the past, but as a site of temporal negotiation—where time opens, and the present slows.
In 2025, Stonham completed a Master of Fine Arts at the National Art School, receiving the Standish & Co. Scholarship, the Prix Yves Hernot Award of Merit, and the Harvey Galleries Exhibition Prize. In 2024, she was awarded the Perth Centre for Photography’s Contemporary Landscape Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions include Inside the Empty Interval (2026), Photo Access, Canberra; Everyday Wonder (2024); Looking Forward, Looking Through… Future Perfect (2023), Five Walls Gallery and Project Space, Melbourne and Conversations with My-Self and Others (2022), M16 Artspace, Canberra.
Stonham has been selected for the 2026 National Photography Award exhibition at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), and has been a finalist in major national prizes including the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize, and the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize.
Her work has been profiled in The Sydney Morning Herald, reviewed in The Canberra Times, and is held in private collections across Australia and Europe.