Fungi at sunset — nature glows in crazy light as short wavelengths scatter and the sky changes colour. The title carries its physics: scattering is the mechanism by which the...
Fungi at sunset — nature glows in crazy light as short wavelengths scatter and the sky changes colour.
The title carries its physics: scattering is the mechanism by which the sky turns orange and red at sunset, short blue wavelengths bouncing out while the longer reds and oranges come through. Kath Leone's five-layer screen print takes that specific quality of light — the saturated, slightly unreal glow of a sunset mushroom — and renders it in the overlapping translucent inks that are her signature medium. Leone is originally from Cape Town, South Africa, now based in London. She has synaesthesia — specifically grapheme-colour and chromesthesia — and her relationship with colour is not purely optical but sensory in a more expansive sense. Five layers, hand printed by the artist onto heritage white paper. 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.
