"Playing With Leaves"

Solo Show at Roxy Gallery, Kyogle. 2025

Playing with Leaves is rooted in a childhood game, where I collected leaves to create images - planes, faces, cars - using them to tell stories that helped me make sense of my world. This simple game has evolved into a profound artistic exploration.  

This game has become a tool for my creativity and mindfulness. It allows me to explore emotions and narratives through the anthropomorphising of leaves.   I use my extensive leatherworking experience to meticulously craft realistic leaves from leather, capturing their vibrancy and stages of decomposition.  As in the process of turning skin into leather, I have halted the decay of the leaves and their ephemeral beauty, making permanent compositions that capture those fleeting moments of childhood play.  

On a deeper level, there is irony in representing plant life with the by-product of animal death.  Leaves are quitessential emblems of life. They are renewal, photosynthesis, oxygen providers and life itself.  To craft a leaf out of leather is to take the skin of a dead animal and reshape it into a symbol of living, breathing greenery. 

There is a poetry in doing this, a reflection on the cyclical nature of all things in our world through life, death and change. 

This exhibition showcased the unique aesthetic that forms when Playing with Leaves.