In The Heath Fairies, Kath Leone invites us into an enchanting, botanical world where the boundary between plant, fungus and spirit blurs into poetic imagination. Created especially for the Blisters:...
In The Heath Fairies, Kath Leone invites us into an enchanting, botanical world where the boundary between plant, fungus and spirit blurs into poetic imagination. Created especially for the Blisters: Time to Play exhibition, this six-layer handmade screenprint is presented here in a box frame at 50% off the standard frame price — the discount already applied in the listed price.
Leone's signature style — lush layering of translucent inks, intricate linework and a muted yet glowing palette — animates the heathland's mosses, fungi and undergrowth with an otherworldly presence. The fairies emerge not as traditional winged creatures but as delicate junctions of mycelium, leaf and light. The piece was inspired by two mushrooms found on Hampstead Heath the morning before the Blisters deadline. A fairy playground literally encountered on the way to the studio. Leone is originally from Cape Town, South Africa, now London-based. Limited edition of 100, signed. £303.60.
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.