Bodies of Land features Ann Leda Shapiro and Hanako O’Leary, two artists known for bold feminist perspectives in their work. Drawing parallels between the body and landscape, this exhibition highlights how both ecosystems are impacted by society through explorations of feminine power, environmental exploitation, and global mythology.
Ann Leda Shapiro’s intricate watercolors push the medium beyond its traditional boundaries through dense, repetitive mark-making influenced by folk art and Southeast Asian miniature painting. Her current work deconstructs elements of traditional landscapes – trees, roots, water, celestial bodies – and reconstructs them in ways that highlight their existence as parts of interconnected, organic systems.
“Historically my paintings were about the body based on clinical observations in my acupuncture practice... Presently I am deconstructing the landscape and putting together the observed with the imagined, merging my human beingness and the body.” ~ Ann Leda Shapiro
In these works, roots evoke veins and nerves; branches of trees are limbs stretching toward the forces that feed them; and their trunks soft, rippling silhouettes. Simultaneously strong and fragile, Shapiro’s natural world is sometimes shown in danger from societal forces such as nuclear weapons, while also shown as humanity’s lifegiving protector.
Hanako O’Leary is a craft-based multimedia artist interpreting modern feminism through myth, metaphor and storytelling. In Bodies of Land, she presents ceramic sculptures from her continuing Izanami series, which traces the mythology of the Shinto Goddess of life and death. Masks, which recall both Japanese Noh Theater and protective helmets, represent guides along Izanami and O’Leary’s journey. Her sculptural vessels are amalgamations of sinuous bodies and female genitalia, with the occasional middle finger raised in defiance. This gesture initially is a sign of anger, now the artist uses it as a demand for her pleasure, and an invitation to investigate yours.
Also debuting in this exhibition is O’Leary’s new site-specific installation, Bakoku [Mother’s Country], in which O’Leary explores the feminization of land and honors matrilineal heritage. A sculptural island rises from the ground, with its undulating curves suggesting a woman’s body, covered by hundreds of origami vulvas created by O’Leary and community participants.
“I made this piece imagining my mother’s homeland of the Setonaikai islands as a giant resting goddess. In a constant state of growth and decay, her body is an island resting in the ocean.” ~ Hanako O'Leary
Throughout the exhibition, the lines are often blurry where the human body ends and the earth begins. In many works, interventions by society can be seen to affect both body and land – from reproductive rights to nuclear war. Each artist calls on the viewer to explore how caring for the land, caring for the body, and honoring bodily autonomy are interconnected.
Hanako O'Leary
Hanako O’Leary is a craft-based multimedia artist currently living and working in Seattle, WA. She was born and raised by her Japanese mother and American father in the suburbs of Chicago, spending summers with family in Hiroshima, Japan. This deep connection with both sides of her heritage allowed O’Leary to explore how our stories reflect our beliefs about the world, women, and their power. O’Leary explains “I make art because I believe it is through my hands that the deepest secrets, oldest stories, and most potent magic of my ancestors are preserved. My hands hold stories my voice has yet to discover, and with them I will make our power be known.”
In 2020, O'Leary was a finalist for the prestigious Neddy Award from Cornish College of the Arts.She also received a 2020 MAC Fellowship through the Robert B. McMillen Foundation. She holds a BFA in Ceramic Sculpture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA from Seattle University. Currently, she is building her ceramic works at Pottery Northwest in Seattle, WA where she is a long-term resident artist.
Artist Statement - Hanako O'Leary
Izanami Series - This series began in February 2018 when I had an abortion. For me, this very personal experience shed light on a long held collective truth; some of us possess the ability to beckon or deny new life into the world, and current society is both afraid and ashamed of this feminine power. The next day after my surgery, I began this current body of work.
Izanami, meaning, “she who invites,” is the Shinto goddess of creation and death. According to legend, after giving birth to many gods and goddesses, Izanami died while giving birth to fire and was sent down into the underworld. Her husband, stricken with grief, went after her to bring her back but he was too late. While her soul remained, her body was ravaged by death. Shocked by what he saw, his longing was replaced by terror and he fled. Upon reaching the surface he sealed the portal with a bolder, leaving Izanami trapped and forever breaking their union. Sealed within the dark walls of the underworld, Izanami’s story in the Shinto pantheon ends here.
Izanami was once a beautiful goddess embodying all that is desirable in the feminine- youth, fertility, and sexual service. Once she entered the underworld, she came to symbolize death, suffering, and mortal decay. This side of her was met with fear and banished from society. Through my work I continue Izanami’s story, embracing the mystical feminine realm in its entirety and celebrating the right to create or destroy what lies within our own underworld.
Bakoku Installation - In this work I explore my connection with my matrilineal heritage through the feminization of land. Bakoku (the installation piece) in Japanese means, “Mother’s Country.” Since 2018, I have been working on a body of work, Izanami, that traces the mythology of the Shinto Goddess of life and death. This mythology is believed to originate from the Setonaikai Islands of Japan, my mother’s birthplace and childhood home. In the story of Izanami, there is a scene of her as a corpse. She is described to be in a state of decay, with the seven demons of thunder being born from her corpse.
I made this piece imagining my mother’s homeland of the Setonaikai islands as a giant resting goddess. In a constant state of growth and decay, her body is an island resting in the ocean. The piece is made out of many squares of shoji paper folded into the shape of a vulva, then hand stitched into a large quilt. In Japan, there is a tradition of folding 1,000 paper cranes to make a wish come true. With this piece I revisit this tradition of sitting with my family and folding these forms over and over until it becomes part of my muscle memory.
Ann Leda Shapiro
Ann Leda Shapiro grew up in New York City. She spent the Sixties at art school in San Francisco receiving her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the University of California at Davis. Shapiro protested the Vietnam War, participated in consciousness raising groups and embraced feminism. Her gender-bending drawings defied norms and questioned existing social limitations.
After decades of extensive travel throughout Europe and Asia and living and creating art across the US while teaching as a university art instructor, Shapiro settled on Vashon Island. She now works as an acupuncturist and has maintained an art studio in the shadow of Mount Rainier for the past twenty-five years. Shapiro has exhibited her paintings and drawings at numerous venues, including the Whitney Museum in New York, the Berkeley Museum in California, the Frye Art Museum, and at the Seattle Art Museum as part of the permanent collection.
Artist Statement - Ann Leda Shapiro
The body as landscape has been an ongoing theme in my work and is now morphing into the landscape as body. At the onset of the pandemic, coming from a place of deep sadness and grieving, I was creating paintings called “Portals of Possibilities” that dealt with death and dying and transformation. I was forming beauty from ashes in order to pass through suffering to a place of balance and interconnectivity.
For my mental, physical and spiritual well-being I walk in the woods on the island where I live. My current series takes inspiration from the natural world and looks to trees for their comforting resilience. I love Emily Carr, Charles Burchfield and Odilon Redon and endeavor to channel the spirit, energy and dream like qualities of forests, flora and night skies.
Historically my paintings were about the body based on clinical observations in my acupuncture practice. The paradigm comes from my theoretical training and experience as a Chinese medical practitioner. Climatic phenomena such as wind, cold, heat and mist are the diagnostic vocabulary used to describe imbalances, illnesses and traumas and this imagery is woven into my art. Disasters such as the pandemic, fires, smoke, tsunamis, tornados, storms and atomic nuclear blasts have been the inner and outer environmental components.
The definition of qi (energy) is matter on the verge of becoming. The moment we are simultaneously birthing and dying sums up the underpinnings of my work. As an artist and acupuncturist, I have a unique perspective. Through visual case studies, diagnostics and x-ray vision I investigate layers of meaning, taking the body apart and reconstructing it with elements of the night sky, water and patterns from nature. I reflect what is going on in our exterior world through the interior body as landscape. Presently I am deconstructing the landscape and putting together the observed with the imagined, merging my human beingness and the body.
I have been painting for more than fifty years and my art practice is sustaining me through these challenging and unprecedented times.
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