Lisa Mitchell – Bio

By Clementine Ford

“I recommend supporting your own unraveling.”

So urges Lisa Mitchell in her meditative anthem ‘Supporting Your Unravelling’, a sophisticated and mature attempt by an artist to understand her place in the world. It’s one of many similar devotionals that feature on Mitchell’s fourth album, a glorious and heartrending tribute to what it means to be alive and learning in that same world - to have been old enough to feel its bruises and heartbreaks, but also be at the beginning of understanding our own individual insignificance within it. This is a work that manages to be both wide reaching and transformative in its exploration of what it means to be alive, and yet still feel like it speaks directly to how important the smallest of moments can sometimes feel.

We have a collective cultural memory of Mitchell as a teenage girl appearing on a reality television show, but she has grown so far beyond the hesitancy and insecurity of youth. Culture itself readily positions women’s prime as coinciding with lack of age and experience, but as Hannah Gadsby observes in Nanette, there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself. At 31, and with six years between albums, the shift from ingenue to powerful truth teller and weaver of magic is complete. It’s a transition that calls to Mitchell’s Celtic origins, whose roots can be seen, heard and felt across her latest body of work. This is an album that breathes, and a listener can almost sense Mitchell’s ancestors breathing alongside it. 

And so we return to that line: ‘I recommend supporting your own unraveling’. Ostensibly a specific direction to the listener to unlearn the legacy of white privilege that exists within white settlers on stolen Aboriginal land, it is also a plea for surrender. Surrender what you think you know about history. Surrender what you think you know about power. Surrender what you think you know about yourself.

This theme of embracing humility and dismantling oneself in order to grow and do better in the world is the clarion call of Mitchell’s work. When she returned to Australia after years spent living in London, she committed herself to learning about her own place as a settler in Australia, and her responsibility to address that not just in her work but in her daily practice of living. She enrolled in Indigenous Studies, learning about the languages, history and traditional Cultures of the lands she was striving to tell stories on. Motivated by this unraveling of self, she began to explore her Celtic history and to study the Scottish Gaelic of her ancestors.

To unravel a thing doesn’t mean to destroy it or even to separate it into a million pieces. An unraveled object becomes a singular piece, stripped bare of the artificial shape and form it held before. Unraveling is the precursor to rebuilding, a transition that can and should be done intentionally. In this album, the listener can hear Mitchell’s attempts to be deliberate about her humanity and her choices. Her passion for climate justice rings through clearly, but so too does the way she honours her own integrity as a woman. In ‘Thank You’, she thanks an ex lover who ‘broke my heart awake’. This ability to reflect on the more painful aspects of existence and see within them the opportunity for rebirth is characteristic of Mitchell’s wise storytelling capacity.

There’s a synchronicity to the fact the bulk of this album was written and recorded during the first year of a global pandemic that forced everyone’s lives and spheres to become very small and very still. There is a languidness to the work that feels dreamlike, provoking long buried memories that may be real or may just feel real enough.

The musical essense of the album itself pays homage to a more nostalgic time - not just the folk festivals that Mitchell spent her childhood immersed in, but a time even further back than that. So strong is that growing connection to her Celtic heritage that you cannot help but think of our own cultural motifs and tropes in relation to that. In fact, each of these songs seems rooted in a different time and place - a collection of ideas and desires and human yearnings unraveled for examination, waiting for the listener to put it back together in whatever form makes most sense to them, but with one clear message from the artist: don’t be afraid to go there.

 Once you’ve allowed yourself to be unraveled by Mitchell, you’ll want to return again and again.