Leafwhelmed

21 Mar-12 Apr 2024

PV 12 Apr 2024

Autumn Kami, 2024, handcoloured etching. Credit: Autumn Kami

Overview

Keziah Philipps studied on the Royal Drawing School’s postgraduate programme, The Drawing Year, and is the 2023-24 recipient of the Sir Denis Mahon Award. The prize is awarded to an outgoing Drawing Year student each year and allows them to continue their practice, providing them with funding for a studio space and a solo exhibition at the end of the year.

Keziah’s work sometimes involves found objects and collected natural materials; she often carries prepared copper plates to draw from observation on location. Prior to The Drawing Year, she studied Animation at Kingston University, graduating with a commendation for Expanded Animation Practice: Printmaking.

“For me cartography can be a way to record a time or moment that I have experienced, as well as an immersive world. My work combines worlds I inhabit and worlds I make, and things I wish were real and things that might be real too.” 

Leafwhelmed is an exhibition made up of carefully constructed prints and drawings that weave together close observation, fantasy, memory and imagination. Exploring themes including our connection to the world and our relationship with the environment: the ‘right to roam’ – the legal freedom to access land including mountains, swamps, heaths and downs, and Gaia theory which considers our place as a part of the world. The exhibition also considers the reinterpretation of magic, what magic could mean, and how we can use it to imaginatively recreate a future for ourselves by envisioning common and community spaces as utopian designs. It translates ecological observation and knowledge of natural spaces as an expression of love and value for those spaces, to promote a connection to the natural environment and hold space for it in modern life.

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