Leonie Barton

Artist Illustrator Maker

I gather from the ground and assemble materials together, compositionally hoping for balance and harmony.

These images depict how I respond to my immediate environment, they are site responsive and the materials, site specific. These images are simply records of that moment in my life.

And like all other moments, eventually they’re gone.

I want to preserve these moments not only for myself, but as a reminder to others, to continue to be present, to slow down and look at their world more carefully. To provoke an appreciation and consciousness of the natural world in others, concerned that we are becoming increasingly disconnected from it, oblivious to it’s constant miracles and change. I would like to leave the viewer with a renewed way of looking at their own everyday environment.

The artwork serves as a warning, to highlight the transience of everything that we know, even ourselves.

There is a freedom in the way I work because of it’s temporary nature and the randomness in finding the materials to work with. No day is the same. It keeps my eye fresh, while I’m looking for the connections. It’s a line, a curve, a texture, pattern, colour or even the empty spaces. Its making sure the eye can move around the photograph and still be perhaps, surprised about what the materials actually are.

The backgrounds in some of my work, play an equal part as the materials I lay upon it.

The materials not only have to relate to each other, but to the space around them. It can be a marking upon the ground, a texture, a connection with the light.

For the image to succeed everything must connect, even myself.

I enjoy working in this way, as it can be done no matter where I am in the world. I have completed these works in urban, suburban and outback Australia, in China and the U.S

I like that my artwork eventually returns to the ground where it has come from and that I am not required to be a consumer to create and experience it. It is my way of treading lightly upon the Earth.

All environmental art in a general sense, is art that helps improve our relationship with the natural world, whether it is referred to as assemblage, an exterior installation, earth art, eco art, nature art, however you label it, it is there as a reminder of the fragility of our environment, that nothing lasts.

All is perishable……. even us.