Solo Exhibition by Lea-Anne Sheather
6th June – 15th July 2024
from out of the blue studio gallery is pleased to be one of the hosting galleries for Lea-Anne Sheather’s Handle with Care?: Solo Exhibition that has exhibited in Aratoi, Wairarapa Museum of Art and History and in Taupo Museum earlier this year. Hosting conceptual environmental stitched works is an important event for the studio gallery as part of our vision for the direction and purpose of the gallery and this opportunity has been long awaited. So we will be delighted to welcome Lee-Anne and her works.
Lea-Anne speaks about her work that is in the exhibition Handle With Care? and I have attached observations about her practice and her thinking so that we can all gain a deepened perspective about the works in the collection.
“My work is a visual representation of the stories I tell myself about Earth’s lively, interactive connectivity. Donna Haraway describes stories as having life and death consequences – they really do matter. Stories are “of the world, not in the world. Worlds are not containers, they’re patternings, risky co-makings.”1 When we reflect on meaning, purpose and ethics, it is embedded within a cultural narrative. Cultural narratives stem from the stories we tell ourselves. By expanding the cultural narrative to trust in the goodness of the Earth and through grounding animism into our daily existence we will better understand our part in the biosphere, which in turn, will lead to more responsible, accountable ethics and behaviours.
I am very interested in how dualistic thought2 might contribute to hierarchy and separation between life forms, which in turn leads to some life forms being outside of our ethical considerations. I question Plato’s soul- body dualism that associates the soul with the eternal and the body with nature. This idea accentuates the notion that the meaning of life is not of the natural world, but something to be transcended. The meaning of life is somewhere else. The wonder within nature is less important than the transcendent world that awaits us. I speculate that this has contributed to other than human voices being lost and the natural world being there for human exploitation. I like to suppose that, instead of transcendence being somewhere else, it can be here on Earth.
Kinship and interconnectedness between humans and all life forms are the focus of my work. I also try to reflect the cyclic pulse of nature’s regeneration and its decay. I want to embrace the natural world in both its flux and immutability and to engage respectfully with its power, it’s resilience, connectivity, and ambiguity.
I aim to depict the wonder and spirit of the natural world through the intensity and density of forms, colours and textures that co-exist in a tightly packed space. I want the energy and aliveness of nature to flow through my work and demonstrate the joy and awe I feel for the natural world.”
To speak of the earth… as a living field of relationships between beings- each with its own openness or creativity- is to speak in accord with our senses, and with our bodily experience of the world around us…This primordial form of experience, which returns us from the pretence of disembodied detachment…engenders a new respect and restraint in all our actions. – David Abram
Lea-Anne Sheather’s current practice involves creating 2D and 3D textile, drawn and collaged art. She is interested in exploring the intersecting spheres of nature, the body and spirituality. Through meditation and by keeping an attentive sensory openness to the world around her she seeks a greater connection to nature and a perception of the enigmatic uniqueness of her surroundings. She is open to something subtly calling for her attention. This ‘calling’, she considers as the Other, which she believes we all possess and is the true, lucid spiritual self that is interconnecting and beyond familiar understanding. When something does call for her attention, she intentionally slows down, softens her gaze, and spends time with it, allowing her animal senses to engage. She describes how this sometimes allows, whatever is being observed, to reveal some facet of itself, or some spontaneous bodily experience to occur, to which she pays attention. She believes this helps to engender humility, persistent wonder and sometimes even transcendence. She also believes that through developing deeper sensory rapport with all living things a better understanding of our interconnectivity develops which leads to more gentle intentions with all life forms.
Lea-Anne describes the stitching process as slow and time consuming. The time spent on a work changes her experience of it. The process time when making imbeds itself in the work like a time marker. The time spent opens her up to the subtle callings and calms agitations. Time itself no longer feels linear. It feels somehow more circular. It assists Lea-Anne to work at the right pace for her and not be pressured by the tyranny that linear time can present.
- Bird-Rose, D. ‘Connectivity Thinking, Animism, and the Pursuit of Liveliness’, Educational Theory 2017 67(4), pp. 491- 508.
- The term ‘dualistic thought’ in this context, refers to contrasting, mutually exclusive options, such as male/ female, culture/ nature, civilised/ primitive, human/ non-human. The relationship between the pairs is hierarchical, excluding, opposite and distancing. The dualisms are imprinted and adapted into culture and systematically constructed as higher and lower, superior, and inferior. The differences are treated as the natural order of things and not open to change.