Bed and Lust, 2019, Virginia Leonard
Clay, lustre and resin, 100cm x 55cm x 55cm
Provenance: Martin Browne Contemporary, Melbourne.
Exhibited: Martin Browne Contemporary, Melbourne 2019.
Sculptor, Virginia Leonard lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. Using her experience from a serious motorbike accident in London which left her hospitalised for two years and in chronic pain, she creates intensely emotional and personal ceramic pieces that act as self-portraits. Leonard’s early artistic practice began as a painter, before commencing work with clay in 2013. She moulds clay much as she could have applied paint onto a canvas, to build her work. Clay has a therapeutic language to Leonard, allowing her to harness her pain and trauma into the visceral and clumpy moulding. It resembles bodily scarring but is also a precarious medium, which serves as a reminder of the fragility of her body (1).
“Not knowing traditional ceramic rules was an advantage for me. I could push hard up against conventions, and approach clay in a more reckless and fearless manner,” she says. Leonard twists, wrenches, tears, scars, clumps and distorts the clay and her glazes are applied with a painterly informality. Resins add further jarring surface tension, manipulated into three-dimensional forms which ooze off the surface like thickened lumps of scar tissue. Assembled from multiple parts, with elements such as nails puncturing the surface, works are installed on high plinths, often at precarious angles. Her work also includes the process of stocking, “building precarious towers (of clay) resembling my human form”. (2)