Virginia Leonard – Biography
“I have sought a voice for my own pain. These objects are my body”
Virginia Leonard’s ceramics delight in the visceral. The large vessel-like structures recall domestic everyday items, yet the familiar shapes of vases, jugs, and urns are abstracted, morphed into melting masses of sticky resin and bulging lumps. Oozing clay, resin, and glaze forms are fired mid drip, capturing the precarious nature of Leonard’s physical approach to manipulating her chosen material, which she sees as a proxy for her own body. Her practice is primarily autobiographical, with the pummelling and massaging actions a way to better articulate her personal experience with chronic pain. After more than a decade as an abstract painter, Leonard made the shift to working with clay in 2013, driven by the need to give a voice to bodily trauma saying “chronic pain has no biological value…it lacks both language and voice. The language of my clay making is my attempt to rid my body of trauma and reduce my level of chronic pain.”
