Lydia Viscardi is a representational mixed media artist working in paintings drawing, collage, and assemblage sculpture. Growing up with the stories and images of Catholicism, she absorbed both the beautiful and horrific, and emerged with a paradoxical equanimity. By bringing this mysterious balance into mixed media work, she is enabled to comment on the conflicting conventions of nature, human society, especially everyday life, and the human soul. She visits themes of mortality and its ever presence, loss, and memory particularly childhood memory. Viscardi's work includes representational painting, drawing, and collage materials sourced from printed matter, fabric, vintage handcrafted textiles, and found objects. A hand-wrought aesthetic, learned at a young age from Viscardi's family of handcrafters, permeates her detailed colorful work. The layered compositions and contradictory images reveal a subtle humor and subversive underbelly, often imbuing the work with an enigmatic yet playful tone.