Astrid Leeson

My practice is driven by a love of process, daily walking with a sketch pad and pen, pushing paint around a canvas, painting on plaster, gesso, and experimenting with pigments. I consider the walking and drawing to be fundamental for observation, reflection and for creating a narrative, real, imagined or abstracted from places that we inhabit or to which we were once connected.
The notion of place and non-place has for a long time been an unconscious part of my repeating practice. However, a result of the MFA course reading, this practice is now constructed with attention to history, philosophy and literature. It is through this that the concept of place and non-place and its relationship to my work has become a conscious understanding. Marc Augé defines place as “relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.

2017 MFA (Distinction) Art and Humanities Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design , University of Dundee.
2009 BA(Hons) Fine Art Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland.

Wanderlust:layers of Past and Paint. The Meffan 2018
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS
Beuys fur Alle, Ayr 2017
Edgelands of Experience, Real and Imagined. Masters Show Dundee 2017
Documenting the Hilltown, Dundee 2011
TRiGGER member (A research network group funded by ArtworksScotland/Paul Hamlyn Foundation) 2011-13.
Members Shows Generator, Dundee 2010-2013
RSA: New Contemporaries, Stewart Prize. Edinburgh April 2010
New Skyline for Perth. Commission for Volvo, Buses and Trucks Perth 2009