Leah Marie Hamilton Crossley, Leah

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Performance is the catalyst through which I explore my visual practice.

My work is the result of first-hand, practical engagement with performance – as both participant and as creative, documentary image-maker. With additional research, and personal collections of disparate objects and materials, I build images that reflect the original poetics of performance whilst generating new and personal responses to those ideas and performances.

Digital-photography is my medium, through which I generate digital collages. I augment the initial performative experience by introducing multiple layers, filters and veils (via Photoshop) and/or ‘found’ stimuli (natural objects – flora and fauna; textiles; my own and found photographs – eg. images of surfaces such as water, glass, cracks in the wall, the interplay of light and shadow on different surfaces).

My use of collage compresses my chosen applications; the desired outcome is a unified, re-imaging of the original digital-photograph rather than a three-dimensional collage.

My images are, at times, informed by a potential painterly-ness – achieved by introducing sfumato-esque* qualities to the originals.

The languages of performance and visual practice combine to offer another interpretation – of ideas, expressions, gestures, images, sound, and texts. I endeavour to generate beautiful pictures that can be read like chapters in a larger whole – images that migrate between live performance and visual practice.

*Sfumato derives from the Italian noun fumo (smoke) and the verb sfumare (to rub/blend together the edges of colours, the way smoke diffuses).

Leah Crossley
May 2012