Artist Virginia Leonard has been interviewed and featured on Contemporary HUM. The interview provides a fascinating insight into her making process and how her own personal experiences have influenced her works.
"With ceramics, she said, “I’m never bored because they never work. There are always problems as soon as they come out and the problems are the best part”. Avoiding control seems high among Leonard’s concerns. She is, to some degree, precious about her lack of technical knowledge in ceramics, partly to avoid boredom, but also because a lack of control, and learning to deal with it, is crucial to the experience of chronic pain that she is trying to articulate. A resolved work for Leonard is a piece that is suspended in the slim interstice between her will and the clay’s refusal of it. A work might crack in the kiln, requiring a surgical procedure of resins, glazes and lustre, the application of which – as thick and as craggy as possible – provides another opportunity for Leonard to approach the form’s limits, the point at which it seems to be heaving under its own extravagance."
Read the full article here.
