Leigh C Suggs
Interdisciplinary
Lives and works in Richmond, VA
(b. 1981, American)
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work oscillates between concealing and conceding, veiling and revealing. Embedded in the visual language of craft yet transcending the media-specific, my forms escape fixity while transfixing. But I invite you to remain active and look to the human forces behind the seemingly machine-made—behind the nature of the images themselves. Patterns and grids mutate into radial webs as forms yield to the tension between positive and negative space. Tension itself replaces form as the guiding principle of my works in paper: the familiarity of the grid gives structure to our experience while the hand-cut “warps” and “wefts” nod to the painstaking, processual work of “pink collar” art and labor. I reassert the modernist grid’s ambiguity through its making, remaking, and unmaking; what can we see when we look beyond the grid? The work emerges as timely meditations on concentration and the risks of desensitization, ultimately asking the viewer to consider their own relationship to form.
ABOUT
- Leigh Suggs channels her fascination with the mystery and psychology of sight through cut paper works and large-scale installations. She obscures normal perception, manipulating her materials as if optical illusions.
- Leigh Suggs was born in Boone, North Carolina. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015.
- She has exhibited her work extensively, including exhibitions at The Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA, Penland Gallery
Minnesota State University, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Racine Art Museum, Contemporary
Art Museum in Raleigh, NC, and the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, NC. - Suggs has been awarded several grants and honors, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award, the North Carolina Fellowship Award and two City of Richmond CultureWorks Grants.
- Her work is a part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Weatherspoon Museum collections and corporate collections, including the Federal Reserve Bank, Capital One, Markel Corporation, Suntrust Bank and Fidelity Investments.
PRESS + MEDIA
Three artists challenge each other to
create something new at Vis Arts
[Style Weekly]
The business of being an artist
[Craft Council]
Four artists augment drawings with related practices
[Winston Salem Journal]
The precision tools of Leigh Suggs
[Indy Weekly]