Lea Rose Kara

Collaboration is key to my practice and my degree show work Nature’s Breath was developed from my Bloom project with glass artist Dovile Grigaliunaite. Bloom explored Grigaliunaite’s and my interest in themes of materiality, fluidity, and pushing the expectations of a static object. The collaboration triggered me to think about incorporating the sense of smell into my work, as I began to view the Bloom sculpture as a potential vessel.

I chose to expand Bloom into an installation of three glass sculptures. The vapour is infused with the scent of one of three tree resins - Frankincense, Mayan Dark Copal, and Myrrh - and fills up each glass from within, slowly escaping to the wider gallery through small holes. It evokes associations with the history of plants and organisms that have existed over millions of years. Set on a timer, the vapour machines breathe out the scents every hour, creating a rhythm of inhaling and exhaling that reflects our own breathing. Each glass vessel is set at a different height to allow people to differentiate the three vapours.

Cups of Information are placed around the plinths like protective vegetation and resemble water droplets on the floor. Once touched they transform from being solid like a jade bowl to wobbly like a jelly. The viewers become collaborators, and the previously static Bloom work is activated through their engagement, a more conscientious and intimate encounter.

A Cup of Information, seen here being touched, came from a happy mistake. This unexpected happenstance was experienced during the casting process, and translated into the viewer’s engagement with the piece. During a previous show, I had multiple viewers asking me if they could touch a Cup, curious about its translucent yet solid appearance. Through their touch their expectation was surprised as the bowl wobbled like a jelly. This moment of delight and connection to the object made me consider creating my own army of Cups of Information, which I later incorporated into my Nature’s Breath installation.

During this time, I was reading about our use of senses, with particular interest in the sense of touch. Ashley Montague’s ‘Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin’ and Constance Claussen’s ‘The Book of Touch’ were particularly interesting and established that “to touch is always to be touched”. By intentionally isolating a specific sense, I had the power to manipulate and increase certain emotions such as empathy in a viewer’s experience with the work, and potentially contribute to a wider engagement and new enhanced view of nature.

Thinking about the land, rocky outcrops and soft voluptuous contours were on my mind from a trip across the Yorkshire Moors and the Peak District. I borrowed these as landscape in the Evolve work to create suggestions of ripples in water, topography, or the meditative practices of the East like sand art. I wanted the work to have both a micro and a macro quality, with the looseness of the wool suggestive of a indigenous aesthetic linking traditions of working and respecting the land, animals, and the spirits amongst us.

Responding to an exhibition theme of Memory and Dreams, in preparation for a touring show in China, I created Echoes of the Mind #1 and #2. I was exploring ideas of consciousness and unconsciousness, and I created the drawings whilst blind-folded and freely responding to music. The idea of communication and language - symbolic, literal, or suggestive - is interesting to me and by presenting this ‘line-work’ in China first, I am exploring the symbiosis of alphabet and art.

The Footsteps sculpture consists of individual tiles made from wax and organic materials. Like those used as decor in houses, the tiles are symbols of a forest floor being walked on without consideration, however as artworks in the floor of a room they are respected and walked around. I used wax to preserve the organic matter and by mixing it with hot wax and moulding it in water, I give it reconstructed significance. When Footsteps is installed into a gallery’s floor, it plays with the concept of taking a step, and the viewer’s hesitation to walk on the tiles brings attention to the delicacy and importance of nature beneath our feet. 

Traces is an artwork that has been developed from a research project that I did at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I worked with a palaeontologist who specialised in tree resin that had captured small insects. I found this exciting as conserving animal traces in tree resin is close to what an artist does whilst casting and mould making, preserving ideas and objects in art form. The image used to create Traces is based on a Chondrites fossil, part of the Trace Fossils sub-section in palaeontology. Trace fossils are fossils depicting a footprint, trail, burrow, or other traces of an animal rather than the animal itself. The fossil that I was focused on is thought to come from a small worm, and captures the tunnels that the animal was making. This fossil is unique because the planetary conditions in oxygen and moisture level had to be perfect for it to be created in the first place, and preserved today; the fossil may have special value if an ancient billion year old worm brings us a step closer to closing to understanding the evolutionally process. 

The Sun piece represented my first sculptural exploration into incorporating colour into my work though bundle dying collected forest matter and cooking spices, onto textile-based materials like cotton. I could see nature as both my subject matter and my sculpting material. The recurring hemispherical and spherical shapes throughout my work are a direct inspiration from existing spheres in nature, such as eyeballs, flowers like the seed head of a dandelion, planets and cells. The shapes carry themes of containment and expansion and in my Sun work, the shape offers a multiplicity of meanings from a heavily pregnant belly to a bacterial growth on a wall. It is designed to reflect both the positive and negative.

The Freud Museum virtual residency last year opened my eyes to the potential for virtual and hypothetical sculpture. Being able to work with an existing museum object was an exciting and rare opportunity. I chose to explore a small jade brooch that Sigmund Freud had gifted his daughter Anna as a way of showing his professional respect for her contribution to the field of psychoanalysis.

Celebrating Sigmund and Anna Freud's intriguing relationship, their professional achievements, and their ability to provide both children and adults with a new outlook on inner world feelings, I deconstructed the brooch and presented it as two jade hoops positioned as a lens through which viewers would could 'hypothetically' look.

In October last year I organised and curated my first ever event, a show called Art for Artists where I exhibited 27 artists including myself, and showcased 30 artworks comprised of paintings, sculptures, videos and mixed media. Exclusively open to the participating artists and 10 selected guest curators, this exhibition was not intended to promote artworks to the public, but instead to bring artists together to discuss each other’s practice and by the end of the night exchange works by mutual agreement.

The event was successful and something that I will develop, perhaps doing annual or bi-annual shows to actively build new networks and relationships between galleries, artists, and curators.

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