Artist floor Talk: Virginia Leonard

Artist floor Talk | Saturday 12 November, 11am

Join us to hear artist Virginia Leonard discuss beauty, pain and shame through her clay, resin, and oozing glazed ceramic sculptures.

“My works are representations of my body. It is an ongoing dialogue I have with the realities of the voicelessness of chronic pain and bodily scarring and the daily need to articulate and divine a visual language to process and translate life with scarring and chronic pain. My work holds connotations of revulsion, but it also vital, evolving and honest. I feast upon the process and change, championing the organic reality of my body, its fragility and its involvement in a world of flux. Human physicality isn’t static or closed, the classical ideal is impossible and sterile. More exciting is to understand that I inhabit a ‘body of becoming’ ."

Virginia Leonard holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, which she completed in 2001. In 2019 she won the Artist-in-Residence Prize in Finland as part of the Open to Art Ceramic Award, Officine Saffi, Milan, Italy, and was the recipient of the Glass House/Stone House Residency in Chenaud, France. In 2017 she won the Ceramic residency at Guldagergaard, Denmark. She won the Merit Award in the 2015 Portage Ceramic Awards, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland. Leonard’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Australasia and internationally, including exhibitions in Switzerland, Italy, USA, and Denmark. Her profile is featured in the influential Thames and Hudson book 100 Sculptures of Tomorrow, and her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The James Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland; Gallery of South Australia; and the prestigious Ann G. Tenenbaum Collection, New York.

Free. No booking required.