You may know me as Lisa from Bring Me My BattleAxe. Here is an opportunity to know me more than that 9-square grid of IG allows.
Before Bring Me My BattleAxe…
I was born in Malta in the 80’s. This is a tiny independent archipelago in the Mediterranean, making me Maltese and from one of the smallest nations on Earth.
It’s wasn’t all dreamy ancient temples and sunset beaches though. I was very creative but growing up my island lacked a formal art school. I had to teach myself to make art, off of books and magazines. Preferring my own company meant I had incredible amounts of time to myself, and I drew and wrote my way through childhood.
Through gumption and a bit of luck, from the age of 16 I was able to work and make money as an artist. I found entrepreneurship to be just another way of being creative. At first through gallery shows but then, in the field of illustration. In my 20’s I created mainly in a certain style of artwork I called digital collage. I discovered it by accident when I moved to Paris and lived in an apartment too tiny to paint in. Necessity made me try out a scrappy little graphics tablet I was given, and play around in Photoshop. Developing this technique was to be historic for me (I have Youtube videos where I show the process). I built a brand around my style and sold stationery, prints, homewares with my art on them. I called it Meluseena.
For a decade between 2007 and 2017 Meluseena and a variety of odd art jobs for a bevy of clients (book and CD covers here, children’s lit there) were my career. In 2008 I published a book. I worked for many years with two major greeting card companies, creating saccharine art that looked like nothing else I made - a joy to create, but a confusing thing to put in my portfolio.
2011-2012, I worked on a millnery project Moth and Bayleaf, where I was right at the centre of the hipster ‘going out in a costume’ zeitgeist, but had to abandon the baby-brand once knock-offs from of my work made cheaply overseas pushed me out of my eyrie like a cuckoo victim.
Nomad Soul
In my late 20’s and 30’s I lived all over Europe, moving country every handful of years. France was my home, as was Ireland, then Berlin. Through these changes I found I was making illustrations for a brand that though my own, I’d grown distant from.
The Birth of BMMBX
By chance I took a metalsmithing class with Kirsten Karacan in Berlin, which was one of those whimsical moves that ends up changing your life. My muse returned. Metalsmithing would lead me to a further level of alchemy with cloisonne vitreous enamel, where in glass and wire I found I could express my ideas in the best of ways. Bring Me My BattleAxe was born in 2017, a brand which was more of myself than any other. Over the following years I worked on building a visual language based on an aesthetic I had been working on all my life. My decades in illustration started to bear fruit to my own soul. A solid base of collectors (some of whom had crossed over with me from my previous artforms) that reached into their pockets to purchase my work, made sure that I could keep producing it.
Since then I have been perfecting my cloisonné and enamel work. Of all the art techniques I’ve worked in - from 3-D modelling to dancing - it is the hardest and least forgiving. They do say working with fire in art takes a certain degree of masochism - the kiln does things with its door shut that often leaves one weeping, and confused, and not always certain what quite happened.
And so few people work in this field there is precious little information out there should one need it. Perhaps this is why I love it so much - that and, it fit my aesthetic, inside it I marry my interest in bold line, symbolism, iridescence, limited colour palettes and an endlessly revolving theme of things that interest me - from the paranormal to spirituality to symbolism and myth.
This Museum
This website (lisa-falzon.com) used to be a repository for my illustration, a kind of hodge podge portfolio. But now that time feels well and truly in my past.
Feeling like I have a form of roots, I’ve stopped my wandering and came back to my island, like Odysseus did before me. I turned this website into a mausoleum, a museum for my cloisonné work. Here interested folk can read up to find out meanings behind certain collections and the thoughts and writing behind them which, debuting on IG, would plumb the IG grid inside their humble caption formats, to be lost to time and perhaps to be eventually archived.
Through this website, collectors will be able to look back on the collections their pieces came from, for posterity’s sake.
I hope you’ll enjoy taking a look and perhaps, while I’m still an earthling, collect a piece from me in the future to join you inside your pyramid.
Check out what’s on offer at the BMMBX shop.
If you are curious about the process of cloisonne, this IGTV will take you through my process. I do not offer classes at this time.
Lusting after something you’ve seen in the museum? See what artworks I currently have for sale.
Here I reveal my process, my day-to-day life, my upcoming collections. It is also the best way to contact me