A magical scene of fruiting bodies inspired by woodland walks in Forest Row, East Sussex. This small edition of only 20 prints is an autumnal celebration of these true champions...
A magical scene of fruiting bodies inspired by woodland walks in Forest Row, East Sussex. This small edition of only 20 prints is an autumnal celebration of these true champions of the forest.
The seven layers of screen print lay over an earthy hand-painted background of yellow ochre watercolour, the warm ground giving the fruiting bodies the particular quality of autumn light — the colour of the season already present in the paper before the ink layers add the mushrooms above it. Kath Leone draws directly from encounters in the natural world: the Forest Row walk giving her both the specific fungi and the specific light quality that a different woodland at a different time of year would not. Edition of just 20 copies, each slightly different due to the hand-painted ground. Leone is originally from Cape Town, South Africa, now London-based, with synaesthesia that gives her colour perception a heightened sensory dimension. Signed. £185.
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.
