The Wedding Breakfast An Ode to Olly: Virginia Leonard

Virginia Leonards’ practice is intrinsically linked to the state of her body. It hasn’t always been an easy one to live in—injuries from a serious accident in her youth have meant a lifetime of chronic pain, operations and bodily scarring, with the latest procedure being a knee replacement. It was the incredible support from her long-term partner, Olly, during this recent recovery that has led her to dedicating this exhibition to him, The Wedding Breakfast An Ode to Olly.

The idea of the wedding breakfast has stuck with Leonard since she and Olly visited the opulent Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom in 2023. Her experience of the excessive and disparate wealth of a home like this was distinctly countered by a bizarre element within the formal dining room. The long table was set for a lavish and traditional wedding breakfast. Among the fine silver and furnishings an incredibly incongruent, tacky display of brightly coloured, shiny resin food was laid upon the table. Leonard was so taken with the ludicrous visuals of the scene—the historic highbrow opulence of the Palace, versus the absurd display of fake food, that this visual has stuck in her memory since. One of the works shown is aptly titled Fake Food, immortalising this.

Indeed, a playful confluence of elements is core to Leonard’s practice. Vessels formed from clay have a history almost as long as human existence and are a deeply familiar concept. Yet Leonard’s vessels are anything but conventional. They startle and delight the viewer in their unexpectedness. We are lured into wanting to touch their dripping surfaces to see if they are wet, or if the bulbous rounds are soft (they are in fact the opposite). The works undergo a layering of processes to create this impact. Formed in clay, fired, glazed, fired again, glazed in precious gold lustre, fired again before being layered in resins…exploration of materiality is central to her practice. This new body of work furthers her experimentation with the unexpected, through the new inclusion of polystyrene, expanding foams and custom-blended automotive paints she has created. Both The Secret History Of A Drop Foot and Dented Knees show this play—the ceramic vessels are heavy and hard, although appearing viscous and dripping; they sit upon their sturdy monolithic plinths, which in being polystyrene are in fact lightweight and porous.

Leonard’s practice is an experimentation of what her materials are capable of, just as what her body is capable of.  She had considered creating smaller works for this show, in anticipation of a need to recover from the surgery. However, as often happens through the deeply innate process of her work, her body felt strong and wanted to create on a larger scale. The five largest works are all a testament to having resilience and trust within a creative practice.

Leonard has learnt to accept ideas of imperfection due to her own physical limitations, and this filters through into embracing them in her works. An Ode to Olly, one of the largest works, poignantly carries an open crack in the side of the vessel from when it was fired in the kiln. Spontaneity and instinct are central to these creations; Leonard has spoken that even if she spends weeks thinking about and planning a specific work, this can all change on the day of making, and the piece may only hold a tiny element of what she had planned. This is through her own decision making, as well as the materials and their transmutations through touch and extreme heat. One can’t help but reflect on how this mirrors the human experience of existing in a body—each day we feel different, whether tired and sore, or capable and strong, and this impacts the proceedings of our day. Perhaps this is why I experience such a sense of peace when presented with Leonard’s works, despite their bold presence and elements of visual chaos. They make me feel more able to accept the transient, imperfect, or unconventional.

Text by Imogen Cahill