Urns for Unwanted Limbs and Other Things: Virginia Leonard

“An urn to hold a foot, a left leg, a shameful limp, abdominal fat, double chins, in-laws, daughters who are woke, or mothers who are not woke enough. There is an urn for everyone and everything.” - Virginia Leonard

Virginia Leonard works with clay, resin, and oozing glazes to create ceramic sculptures. Leonard’s layering adds a voluptuous tension to her work which is organic and revulsive but is also vital, evolving, and honest.

This is Leonard’s daily need, as an artist, to articulate a visual language which processes and translates life with scarring and chronic pain; a notion that we inhabit a ‘body of becoming’ and that human physicality isn’t static or closed.

Urns For Unwanted Limbs and Other Things is Leonard’s first exhibition at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga - Hastings City Art Gallery.