Geraldine Leahy is a contemporary landscape artist with an interest in environmental concerns. She returned to education to study art with The Open College of the Arts, the distance-learning partner of The University for the Creative Arts (Farnham, England). A lifelong interest in landscape and the natural world informed her degree studies, and in her final project, she focused on the damaging effects of coastal erosion on one of her local beaches. She has continued to engage with this subject since achieving a BA (Hons) Painting degree in 2022.
Regular visits to the beach have made the artist aware of the entanglement of natural and manmade materials on the shoreline and of the detrimental effects the latter has had on the littoral environment. Ironically, Leahy’s use of manmade debris such as plastic and rope, which she embeds into the painting surface by monoprinting, often results in artworks that possess attractive, organic, and flowing qualities. These seemingly innocuous characteristics confirm that manmade materials are stealthy and contagious adversaries, becoming entangled with and imperceptible from their natural counterparts as they contaminate the environment.
The artist hopes that by highlighting these incongruities, the viewer will be drawn to reflect on the effects their own actions might have on the environment. Consequently, Leahy continually engages with opportunities to submit work to art publications, awards, and exhibitions as a way to bring this concern to a wider audience.
''My practice involves the observation of traces and imprints in the coastline, the marks of both natural processes and human interventions. I explore impermanence and mutability by investigating residual marks in the environment following severe weather events. My paintings seek out the unexpected in the landscape – incongruous objects and situations that are the result of natural processes and human actions. A discarded bicycle gear interrupts the natural beauty of the place. Unravelling the fibres of rope possess strangely organic characteristics. Plastic strands, deadly to marine life, ironically generate diaphanous forms that float elusively in the water.
My approach involves working with layered processes that reflect the mutability and temporality of a fragile environment. Perception of local memory, embedded and submerged, resurfaces and is exposed in personal belongings as the terrain disintegrates and subsides. Fragments of crockery and broken bottles jut out of the sand. Walking is interrupted by tilting fence posts, collapsing dunes, and scattered fragments of corroded metal. Coils of wire, flex cable, netting, and splintered wooden planks lie in the sand. These items linger on the beach, traces and imprints of the processes of a changing climate.
As I walk the coastline, I become aware of the entanglements of the natural and the manmade - the pernicious inseparability of materials such as plastic and seaweed, wire and grass. I explore the incongruity of manmade materials, which assume the appearance of organic forms throughout the painting process. These forms mutate into evocations of the entanglement of mankind and the natural world. ''
