About Me

The primary drive of Leigh Ferris’s work is the distillation of beauty through her singular perception of colour, with form and texture sometimes unwilling co-conspirators.

​

To view Leigh’s work up close is to experience a disorienting overload of colour and disjointed connections. The first urge is a childlike desire to touch it—to run your hands over the contours and topography of the work like an omnipotent creator, feeling out the eddies, streams, and valleys of a newly created landscape.

​

An expert preparatory application of media to canvas—papier-mâché, sand, texture mediums, and others—creates an inviting object that demands to be inspected.

​

Dried folds in papier-mâché create wrinkles that catch the light and capture pools of brilliant colour, giving an impression of a circulatory system—a sense of a living, breathing thing, but frozen in a moment in time—perhaps a reference to Leigh’s job as a specialist nurse in organ donation, where the thin line between life and death is an ever-constant factor.

​

Huge cracks appear in the middle of a canvas, revealing a bright, brilliant gold underneath, hitherto hidden but brought into sharp view by an uncontrollable rupture or tear. Leigh uses raw and unfiltered emotions from her life in her work, translating the anger, despair, happiness, or hope into singular, non-repeatable instances of simply feeling. There is no place to hide—it is all there on the canvas.

​

As you move out and survey the pieces in their entirety, you are struck by their inherent musicality—the way that similar techniques or shapes repeat themselves, creating a propulsive beat or melody on which the rest of the paint punctuates and improvises. It is less an act of creation for Leigh than it is one of conduction—waves of colour travelling through the canvas, landing in spaces absolutely controlled but also wonderfully random.

​

But this is all in the service of beauty. Pieces can take weeks, even months, to formulate, but Leigh would say that they are never really finished; they are merely the next iteration in her lifelong quest to understand what colour feels like.

​

It is not easy at first for the viewer—there are no clearly discernible anchors in the work or commonly understood figures or objects. Maybe the odd tree here or there. The occasional flowerbeds may provide some safety. The quiet storm of the ocean in the background may be familiar, but this familiarity is surrounded and undermined by a world of abstraction and pure expression, untethered to an object.

​

The abstract forms in Leigh’s work feel as much about what they are as what they are not. With reflection, the viewer slowly realises that all of these disparate elements and techniques, colours, and textures all collaborate to create a feeling and experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts—an aura and atmosphere uniquely created just for that particular viewer. An intimate, almost mystical connection that reaches back far beyond what one sees, to be ultimately about what one feels.