Sponsored by Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Sovah Health and What's Your Sign.
This drawing series by Leah Raintree underscores the importance of mark making, time and process across her artistic practice. Intricate and maplike, her drawings are produced on crushed paper with charcoal from the 2015 Valley Fire in California. The char was collected from the site of her sister’s home, which was destroyed in the fire. Marks occur at the scale of the human hand, but accumulate to reference the scale of geology, creating a concentrated record of time and attention.
Raintree is based in Richmond, Va. and Brooklyn, N.Y. Her practice focuses on the human connection to earth, with an interest in how we frame and experience time, matter, scale and phenomena. Her work is rooted in an experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with materiality and place. She primarily works across drawing, ceramic, and photographic processes, often using site-specific materials to explore our interconnection with the planet. These investigations occur at the scale of the body, revealing interrelationships between human and geologic scales. Raintree’s childhood was spent on a small farm in rural Virginia and she often returns to the process of “touching earth” as the cornerstone of her practice. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.