A pixie place — the kind of small, sheltered corner of woodland or garden where, in the right light, you can almost believe something is living that isn't accounted for...
A pixie place — the kind of small, sheltered corner of woodland or garden where, in the right light, you can almost believe something is living that isn't accounted for in the field guides. Kath Leone's miniature screen print renders that quality in six layers of translucent overlapping ink on hand-painted watercolour paper: the glow and depth of the colours doing the work that imagination does in the actual forest.
Each copy within the edition is slightly different due to the hand-painted watercolour washes Leone applies to the paper before printing — the botanical ground varying between each impression, so the six ink layers sit slightly differently in each copy. Part of the same mini series as Fairy Caps, Daybreak Dancers, Mosscaps, Ephemeral Fancies and Hortiboletus Rubellus. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, now London-based. Signed. £55.
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.
