Shift: Recent work by Leah Gauthier
“My art over the past several years has been exploring and inspiring sustainable living. While I will continue to champion a mindful existence, a big part of me now feels drawn to surrender and lean into the big climate changes coming our way. These living sculptures, a brand new body of work entitled Some Bring Gifts, incorporating food, foraged natural materials, live plants, and handmade objects, are at once my imaginings around a quickly shifting landscape, new juxtapositions of flora and fauna, emerging and extincting life forms, and my struggle to be fully present moment to moment.”
Leah Gauthier (b. 1963, Chicago, IL) is an intermedia artist who lives and works in Brunswick, Maine. Her work explores food–growing, eating, cooking, preserving, scent and memory, food as sculptural material, history of food and agriculture, revival and protection of endangered food plants, urban agriculture, sustainable and transitional growing, and food as cultural identity and an agent of social change.
Gauthier’s art has been exhibited in traditional and unconventional spaces, including Eyebeam in New York City; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts; Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine; SoFA Gallery at Indiana University in Bloomington; Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine; the National Heirloom Exhibition in Sonoma, California; GASP Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts; 808 Gallery at Boston University, and 0.00156 Acre Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
Gauthier received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has taught at Butler University; Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Art; Indiana University, Bloomington; the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Tufts University; and Chester College of New England. She is a founding member of ||| Art curatorial collective.
