Since 2016 Abby Leigh has devised her own lexicon of deep dents, sharp holes, blunt scuffs, and incised scrawls. Against a structure of DIBOND® —a very hard composite of polyethylene sandwiched between aluminum sheets— Leigh wields sledgehammers, ice picks, screwdrivers, and an array of nameless tools with weird ends which pierce and distress the metal. The resulting surface is surprisingly supple, undulant, bowing inward in places then softly swelling out. This “assault” produces the bare bones of a visual composition for the next stage. “After this random given, you have to make sense of it,” she says, “So, you make sense of it.”
Leigh devised this process as a way of working in collaboration with the materials themselves, arriving at mark making and compositions beyond her control, and, in an almost Buddhist sense, at the edge of her conscious mind. The battered surfaces are a visual problem on which her oil painting evolves. From there the painting process is tender, meditative, with the attention they evoke, almost reparative. Often she will re-articulate a depression or a hole in paint with great care. Lately she’s been drawing on the slick surfaces with the point of a screwdriver, which slide around like ice skaters, to create looping all-over drawings with a precarious kind of freedom. Sometimes these marks are then also painted over, leaving faint traces in the body of paint. The final effect is a vertiginous sense of balance, as alluded to in the title of the sole pink painting in the exhibition, Trapeze (2022). There is a freshness, in which the image seems to be changing before your very eyes, that makes these paintings teem with a life all their own.
Jarrett Earnest
Leigh devised this process as a way of working in collaboration with the materials themselves, arriving at mark making and compositions beyond her control, and, in an almost Buddhist sense, at the edge of her conscious mind. The battered surfaces are a visual problem on which her oil painting evolves. From there the painting process is tender, meditative, with the attention they evoke, almost reparative. Often she will re-articulate a depression or a hole in paint with great care. Lately she’s been drawing on the slick surfaces with the point of a screwdriver, which slide around like ice skaters, to create looping all-over drawings with a precarious kind of freedom. Sometimes these marks are then also painted over, leaving faint traces in the body of paint. The final effect is a vertiginous sense of balance, as alluded to in the title of the sole pink painting in the exhibition, Trapeze (2022). There is a freshness, in which the image seems to be changing before your very eyes, that makes these paintings teem with a life all their own.
Jarrett Earnest