Leah
De Mey
I explore the boundaries between the human and non-human and the slippage between these states, across media including paintings, ceramics, and printmaking. With an academic background in Anthropology and research around the Anthropocene, I am interested in exploring and re-presenting ecological integrity and disjunction. I attend closely to natural forms and characteristics such as pattern and texture, encouraging organic symbols and motifs to unfold in my work. Centring my processes as experiential creativity, surges of hyperfocus, imaginative flow, and meditative states inform an embodied practice. In ceramics, the work of translation between my hands and the raw clay signifies the human-nature relationship as one of chaos and compromise. The results are never a given: it is a conversation. With form, texture, and colour, I wield an organic symbolic language of realism and abstraction, in an effort to engage the imagination of the viewer.