Barbara Léon Leclercq
Introduction
A room filled with lucky charms
Lines
Doppelgänger
Poursuivre sa chimère
The sun rises at 6:30
Send nudes
Thesis
CollaborationsLodges
Selected press
CV
Portfolio
Contact
and I tell myself stories ;
The seat of an animal blends into a dark mass, and on the reverse, arms anchored to the ground, from which emerge a composite bone, now contaminating the side of the sculpture. These elements fuse within the clay itself, affiliated and combined without any hierarchy. From these twists oozes a viscous, dripping blue oil, seeming to whisper that the graft continues to operate, unaffected.
My practice attempts to consider the notion of foundation and collapse in the same gesture. It's within this continuous passage that the ruin can be seen as fertile ground, and that lies my intimate conviction that, by working on it deeply, it's possible to elaborate alternative versions.
And the slow gestation of ceramics and drawing opens up so many possibilities. Latent, lazy, underlying, trying to depict these phenomena demands forgetting any kind of direct, instantaneous capture. This need to imagine and make palpable a shifting world is embodied in the chimera, which becomes a plastic gesture as much as a narrative framework. In this way, both organisms and artefacts are constantly re-arranged according to different scenarios, and the proposed installations take the form of a liminal space, where the surrounding forms are as familiar as they are indocent.
These speculative narratives come in several versions of the same story, shaping characters like architectures, in a collage of discontinuous times. Where the event can be reabsorbed and displaced, where one wears the skin of the other in order to feel them better, change roles, and perpetually re-shape this strange, enigmatic, disjointed and plural landscape.
The dog bites its tail, paroxysm of its vertebrate body, finished, interwoven, the circle is complete ! An ancient guardian, protective and faithful figure, the dog remains peaceful; Imperturbable, the Sphinx is too slammed these days, her head rests on the hot, sweating salt, she won't ask her riddle.
I'm in the dual experience of narrator and architect of the place ; in this way, I'm giving the viewer an effusive setting, but also the keys to a possible rewrite.