Leah Willemin is a St. Paul-based artist and designer working with craft, technology, and performance. She makes projects that explore the interaction between large-scale systems and individual experience. Leah is interested in tool-making, material histories, and teaching. Her work has been exhibited at MCBA, Northfield Arts Guild, and the University of Aalto, and has been acquired by the Minnesota Historical Society. She currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Leah Willemin
she/her
St. Paul, MN, USA
“I am a sculptor, metalsmith, and book artist whose work focuses on exploring the relationship between large-scale systems and personal experience. I want to find out how complex systems--natural, technological--affect one another and everyday life. In my work, I knit disparate elements together, drawing them close to my body and the sensory experience of the viewer. I also explore material histories, using complex craft processes to create sensitive, evocative projects.”
How does your work relate to the theme connection?
“This piece meditates upon loss of community while rebuilding in a new place, making new and deep connections while mourning what was left behind. In 2020, like many people, I found myself uprooted and displaced: In a different state and removed from my community, deeply isolated as many were. In the early days, I walked endlessly through parks on my own.
The flower in the piece represents a tickseed flower in the fall, with burrs on it--the kind that get stuck to clothing or animal fur. I was thinking about these seeds as a kind of adornment and as an act of symbiosis: When they stick to me, I am placed in community with the plant who hopes I carry it wherever I am going, and in community with the animals who are also burr-carriers. I wasn't really alone, walking through those parks.
For me, these burrs are like memories, carried along as bodily reminders of where I have walked. Like my memories of that year, they can be difficult and hard to unstick--but the seed head is also beautiful, and the seeds carry promise. Loss and new growth are entangled.
In October 2020 I met my now-wife. We were not able to be in a ""bubble"", but we started walking together through those same parks. Our life together, and our shared community, has deepened and grown. The seedlings on the bottom of the piece represent unexpected community and family--and the leaves of the trees that grow outside our house. Like queer connections that can take many different forms, these are new and varied plants taking root from the tickseed."
"Entangled", Titanium, silver, copper wire, stainless steel, 3D-printed PLA, glass beads, 5.75" x 2.75", 2024
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Francely Flores
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Francely Flores
What role does connection play in your creative process?
“Literally: I often use titanium, 3D prints, and other non-traditional materials in my work, and these demand creative connections. In this piece, rivets, wire, and soldering hold disparate materials together. These literal connections are from community connections: I learned riveting, soldering, and setting from educators and colleagues in shared studios.
As an artist, I try to pull on the thread of a system and find out where it takes me, how it connects me to other people, other creatures, or to other pasts and futures. I often explore connections within the natural world, and examine how humans are part of the ecosystems they live within. As an artist who works with technology, I consider how digital networks connect and also divide people. I work with circuits and microchips, making literal connections, and also explore how these technologies are related to the material world, craft, and labor--the copper, gold, and silver found in electronics are not so different than the metals on my bench."
What connection(s) does your queerness make to the world around you?
"Queerness has made me open to the multitude of connections that can constitute community, family, and relationships. It makes me observant of the many forms that love and care can take.
My queerness also makes me aware of the necessity of connections and community: Queer people in the past and today have organized, survived, created art, cared for one another, and made their own spaces through community and the strength of their connections with one another. Queerness, to me, is about solidarity--understanding that I am connected to not just other queer people but also anyone who is oppressed.
My queerness also helps me connect to my own body and understanding of self. As a metalsmith, I see how I and other queer people approach gender expression, adornment, and being embodied. I make art with a deeper understanding of how objects can express identity and queer experience."
NYCJW24 @ UrbanGlass, Simon Leung
“Until recently I did not have a metalsmithing studio. I answered a listing online for the contents of someone's studio as they retired, and only on pick-up did we realize that he is the relative of a colleague. It's a gift to inherit a bench and tools that represent a career of accumulated skill--and to be able to send updates about what I'm making with them."
Anything else you would like to share about this work?
This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
[queerphoria]v4 @ ECU Symposium
