After a decade away from making art, Lisette May Monroe returns with Hard Lines, an exhibition shaped by heartbreak, health and the body. In conversation with Hatty Nestor for Elephant, she reflects on the power of telling your own story.
Lis and I met years ago outside a reading in Glasgow, and it was an instant affinity. Since then, we’ve remained close friends, seeing each other through life’s upheavals. At this year’s Glasgow International, she presented her first solo exhibition, and first artwork in a decade. Over those intervening years, she worked as an art critic, publishing in Frieze and The Guardian, while also co-directing Rosie’s Disobedient Press with Adrien Howard. But Hard Lines, at Gulabi’s new gallery in Glasgow’s Southside, marks a new chapter, artistically and personally, following a fraught breakup and a diagnosis of early onset Menopause in 2024, and a lifelong diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Comprising video, sculpture, photography, collage, textile works, and a paperback reader featuring an interview with Hannah Proctor and poems by Rachel Allen, Hard Lines navigates heartbreak, disability and the body. The show, in part,suggests that making oneself visible can produce a new subjective truth. Or, to put it another way, catharsis isn’t just simply release; it is an intervention in the present that gestures towards a different future.
Hatty Nestor: Over the past ten years, you’ve focused on art criticism and curatorial work. But with Hardlines, you’re returning to your artistic practice. Why now?
Lisette May Monroe: I’ve always seen all those roles as part of my practice. The work is research-led – a tutor of mine once said, “you have to do what’s right for the work”, and that’s all I try to do. I stepped back from making my own work for a while, partly because I was focusing on curation and art criticism, which was very absorbing; both things require losing yourself in other people’s work and partly because I was nervous about it. That got the better of me. When the breakup and diagnosis happened, which was within three weeks of each other, I felt so numb, like I had nothing left to give to anyone else, and that immersion in other people’s work suddenly felt impossible. But also I felt like I had nothing left to lose: I didn’t have the energy for nerves anymore, and it suddenly felt like there was a straight line between me and the work. Language which I had used so freely became this constriction; I couldn’t articulate what was happening. So I started making images again, because it felt like the only way to find the edge of this thing, by making the situation more tangible through image-making, and bring my feelings closer to me. It also gave me autonomy in a narrative in which I had none, and I clung on to that as tight as I could.
HN: The show is very personal, connected to the breakup and everything that came with it. I found it interesting that, although it’s so explicit and exposed, there are also moments of concealment. For instance, some of the photographs used are subject to copyright restrictions, allowing only approximately 10% of the collection to be displayed, as the rights are owned by someone else (your ex).
LMM: With both the breakup and health issues, there’s been a constant push and pull between concealment and exposure. With disability, you often try to hide it, but then you’re forced into moments where everything has to be laid bare particularly when interfacing with medical practitioners. The breakup felt similar – I thought I was living with honesty, but there were hidden forms of concealment I wasn’t fully aware of. That’s partly why the work has become so condensed. In the collages, small moments break through, but they’re built from twenty or thirty layered images, where information builds until it starts to obscure itself.
HN: This also touches on disability, the body, and the notion of safety in the home – a space that is, in a sense, the theatre of the relationship. I wonder how you think about that tension, and about making your private home public.
LMM: That was really important, but it only really revealed itself through making the work. I started to think of it almost in terms of characters: there’s me, him, and her. But actually, the house itself became a character, the affair was extensive and it took place in my home. So there was this charge of visibility, my objects and domestic space had been exposed to someone on a day to day level. She now had a relationship with my home, which I had to work quite hard to shift. That’s why it was important to make all these objects visible in the show, and the only way to dispel the charge of her intimacy with them was to make all these things as public as possible. If everyone can see it, that diffusion of looking takes something away from both of them. I, and this is true for a lot of disabled people have a very specific relationship with my home, I rely on it a lot more than able bodied people do. It’s a place to recover and also a place to hide and so for this to happen there and only there, that was the biggest betrayal for me, not the affair.
HN: Do the billboard works speak to this visibility too?
LMM: The billboard works are so essential to the show. When that jewellery was left in my house, it was left with the intention of visibility, which was admitted to. It was left to be seen, to reveal the situation, so for me the logical step was then to take that intention as far as possible, and the end point for that was to put it up on billboards in the city where we all live, reflecting that intention back through the external architecture of the city instead of the interior domestic of my home. Again there is something about shame and dispelling that through this hypervisibility at such an exaggerated scale.
HN: Could you talk about how you’re thinking about revenge? We’re in a cultural moment where people are engaging with the idea in new ways.
LMM: For me, revenge isn’t about punishment; it’s about refusing the shame that society expects you to carry after something like this happens. That’s a feminist issue, too, because shame isn’t applied to men in the same way. When I asked my ex why he did it, he said, “Because I wanted to have a secret.” So the revenge is taking that secret back and refusing to carry it. Staying silent would have meant being complicit in something that felt destructive. So yes, there’s an element of “fuck you” in it, but I hope it’s also become something bigger than that.
HN: I wonder how people who aren’t part of the Glasgow community, or don’t know the details of what happened, will read the show. Can you talk about the film?
LMM: The film came from the locket. What revealed the affair was a necklace I found in the living room. But four months later, after I’d discovered the affair, moved out, cleared the flat, moved back in, and been living there again for a couple of months, I found a locket. What was strange was that the flat had been completely gutted. It had been cleaned by me, by him, by friends, and a professional cleaner, probably six or seven times, and we’d redecorated it too. Everything had changed. So for the locket to suddenly appear at that point felt completely supernatural. That object had such insane potency.
HN: Was it in the sofa?
LMM: It was just on the coffee table next to the TV remote. I still don’t know how it got there, and that uncertainty was confusing. At first I didn’t even know what it was, but I opened it and it had photos of her, her baby, and her husband inside. I remember thinking, where the fuck has this come from? I felt oddly responsible for it and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept imagining throwing it into the river, needing some kind of release from it. That became the basis of the film – these recurring fantasies of release, like replaying the fantasy on loop, but each time it glitches or changes slightly in its projection and it repeats until its intensity flatlines.
HN: Hard Lines is clearly about the “I” and autobiography, but it also feels like a kind of detective work, piecing something together after the fact. How do you see it in terms of archiving your own history, a future version of yourself?
LMM: I want the show to feel like a mood. There’s no text upstairs, and that’s intentional – it’s about capturing a tipping point – an organised disorientation. I come from a small mining village where stories of our history and community have so often been diminished or erased, this made me realise how important it is to tell stories without embarrassment and to stand by them, force them into being, and establish them. Often women’s emotions are dismissed as hysteria or sentimentality, but they’re shaped by what’s placed on us. We need space to expose that, and I’m no longer interested in these emotions being dismissed as “twee” or lacking value. That’s an institutionalised issue, where we value theory over emotion and there is a direct refusal of that in the show.
HN: Feminist thought has historically derived from misogynistic ideas about hysteria, the “hysterical woman,” or the “mentally ill woman.” The show pushes against that.
LMM: On health and menopause especially, I wanted to talk about the body more broadly. It’s very present in the show, and as a viewer you physically move through it, encountering it in different ways. When I started going through it (the menopause), I felt isolated, like my body was disappearing, and I had to force myself to put it back into the work. It felt like my body shouldn’t exist in the same way anymore and there was no space in it at all for desire. I use processes like photocopying and re-photographing to understand things. Menopause is still not talked about enough, and often gets framed through ideas of hysteria or “not coping,”. There is also something about hysteria being an older woman’s issue, the same behaviour in a younger woman is seen as carefree or reckless, which can be charming up to a point. So, there is also something about the desirability of youth and how that complicates things.
HN: What happened is uncanny, and has a sitcom-like quality because so many of the tropes are there, betrayal, the man, the home. It feels strangely predictable. The scorned woman, the forlorn housewife – what do you make of these cliches?
LMM: I have been thinking about Kitchen Sink Dramas, because of the domestic horror that takes place in these films, and how women are dismantled by the relationships they fight hard to protect. The domestic space becomes both a place of concealment and preparation. There are repeated images of the forlorn housewife, waiting, wondering, her hair in rollers, which show a state of constant readiness for visibility. This tension between being seen and unseen is reflected in the threshold of the home, where private routines become public performances. The keeping up appearances aspect of this speaks to my experiences significantly.
HN: HRT hormones used for menopause originally came from pregnant horse urine, it’s incredibly high in oestrogen, right?
LMM: Yes! That’s why the pregnant horse’s belly looms over the show. I see it like this full moon, full of potential. It’s so vital that the horse’s belly stays intact, stays complete. Whereas the image opposite, my chest, which people walk through to get into and out of the show, that’s split open, it’s at the whims of other people.
HN: What do you hope people take from the show, if anything?
LMM: I don’t think it’s necessarily about “touching people”, that can feel like too big a claim. It’s more complicated than that, thinking about how an artwork behaves or acts in the world. But if it can create a kind of empathy for sharing narrative, then for me that feels like success. I’m realistic that people have affairs, and I don’t think that makes them bad people. The issue is when there’s deliberate manipulation and power at play. So the “revenge” sits there rather than in the affair itself, and I don’t think that needs apologising for. It’s funny, a question that only men have asked me about the show is, “do you think you got your revenge?” It’s been asked numerous times. I have realised it’s because they are the only ones that think revenge might be enacted on them, because of their actions or the potential for their future actions. I don’t know what this means societally, but it certainly says a lot more about them than it does about me.
