Zooming in on a tiny patch of mosses, there is a miniature cluster of delicate little mushrooms. The practice of looking very closely at a very small thing — the...
Zooming in on a tiny patch of mosses, there is a miniature cluster of delicate little mushrooms.
The practice of looking very closely at a very small thing — the kind of looking that requires getting close to the ground, that moss-level perspective that most people only have as children — is the starting point for Kath Leone's Mossily. Her pseudo-botanical art is built on sustained observation of the natural world, particularly its more overlooked and miniature inhabitants: the fungi, the mosses, the small insects and plants that reward attention disproportionate to their size. Leone is originally from Cape Town, South Africa, now based in London, and has synaesthesia that gives her a particularly heightened relationship with colour and texture. Five layers, hand printed in our Dalston studios. Signed. £95.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kath Leone
Kath Leone is a London-based artist and textile designer originally from Cape Town, South Africa whose highly imaginative, pseudo-botanical screen prints feature plants, insects, fungi, animals and sea life. She was drawn to screen printing by the glow and depth that overlapping translucent inks produce — a quality she uses to capture something of the charm of old-fashioned fabrics while building the enchanting layered colour palettes that define her work. Leone has synaesthesia, specifically grapheme-colour and chromesthesia, meaning she experiences additional colour, texture and shape perception when hearing everyday sounds and words — a condition that feeds directly into her relationship with colour at every stage of the printing process. She hand-paints the paper in subtle watercolour washes before screenprinting, making each copy in an edition slightly different from the next. Her subjects range from the woodland floor (fly agaric mushrooms, mosses, brambles, oak saplings) to individual butterfly species from around the world, to the fairy-world of mycological imagination.
