Rosie Leventon makes sculptural installations, for both indoors and outdoors, using a broad variety of materials from human hair to recycled central heating pipes. She also draws and paints, using ink, pencil, acrylic, chalk, bitumen and other media to create proposals for sculpture and installations. Although often conceived as outline ideas for larger 3d projects these drawings and maquettes represent a significant body of work in their own right.
Some of Leventon's installations comprise radical interventions into the interior architecture of a building. She has constructed false floors that float on water and which shift under foot. Her outdoor installations sometimes highly ambitious in scale often have a functional, regional element, providing water for animals, for example, or promoting biodiversity and regeneration.
All of Leventon's work however is grounded in a sensitive concern for the natural environment and how we use it. Leventon sees her work as interweaving a kind of personal archaeology with the archaeology of contemporary society and the physical archaeology of places.
Much of Leventon's sculpture incorporates elements of surprise or wryly-mordant humour, but there is also a muscular quality to some of her installations, which carries its own freight of symbolism. 'Forensic Evidence', a piece first shown at London's Serpentine Gallery, comprises a series of recycled stacked scaffolding boards, from which an elegant, wound-like indentation has been hacked, while 'False Floor' is constructed from old scaffolding boards punctured with ragged holes from which water spurts, splashing the surrounding boards. Such pieces possess vaguely menacing connotations, as if one has inadvertently strayed into a place where some catastrophic event has taken place.
Leventon's drawings combine expressive energy with a sculptor's instinct for ground and depth. Surfaces are tactile, often evoking organic sculptural materials, or referencing the elemental aspects of landscape. (Tom Flynn)
She works internationally including Poland, USA, Spain, Germany, France, Japan and Denmark. Her work can currently be seen in Punctuation Marks at Leeds Art Gallery till Oct 3 2010; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in the Queens House; Clifton Country Park near Manchester; Kings Wood, Challock, Kent, and the following books:
'Sculpture Parks and Trails of England' by Alison Stace. (ISBN 13:978-07136-7952-6)
"FABRICA the first 10 years" Introduction by Caroline Collier. Essays by Matthew Miller, Liz Whitehead, Nannette Aldred and Phyllida Shaw. (ISBN 0-9543380-2-2)
MEDITATIVE SPACES by Michael Freeman. Universe Publishing. Rizzoli International.
(ISBN 0-7893-1065-1)
KINGS WOOD: A CONTEXT EDs. Sandra Drew and Liz Kent. Stour Valley Arts.
(ISBN 09535 3409 x)
INSTALLATION ART by Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry. Thames & Hudson. (ISBN 0-500-23672-0)
Rosie invites new challenges and contexts.
