GABRIELLE LEIGHTON

My practice explores the emotional labor and the physicality of the human body through manipulating industrial material in order to reflect the physical and emotional values we endure in our own forms. 

Each piece draws reference to a queer migration from rural to metropolitan spaces, which cuts into us and ultimately reveals an evolved state of existence

By replicating those “cuts” with the movements of my tools, I am able to unearth qualities of an identity within each material I use.

I have found that I can explore identity through a complex, industrially-produced material layered with ‘content’ from its natural, organic source. Each piece of plywood is not completely changed in the manufacturing process but rather edited. No two panels are truly alike. Each surface has a vocabulary of knots ,grains,textures, hues, growth rings, organic networks of fine lines and whirls- and manufacturing defects.

The multiple layers of plywood mirror the multiple layers of our own skin, with as much variety of character found from piece to piece as we find from person to person.

I observe layers of plywood as unfamiliar terrain to be discovered and annotated. My work serves to express overall feelings of tension, vulnerability, pain and balance