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Leesa uses daughters shoes in art show

Leesa Kotting

Leesa Kotting

Local artist Leesa Kötting has recently exhibited work at the Hastings Arts Forum Gallery at Marina Parade. The Voice spoke to Leesa, who lives in Tower Road West, at the group exhibition in early June. Leesa’s piece was a mixed-media installation using casts of her daughter’s shoes in various states of decay, and illuminated footprints of some of those shoes, as well as multiple bone-white casts of the arms and legs of a doll. The overall effect is both poignant and disturbing.
Leesa described the piece in detail. ‘The shoes are different sizes, from different times in my daughter’s life. This piece uses twelve pairs, arranged in a circle, like a clock, to represent time. Some are broken down, some are more whole – like different memories. For me the footprints represent the past, which we need to hold on to. But, of course, mine is just one interpretation. I’m happy for people to respond to my work in their own way.
 ‘I’m particularly fascinated by children’s reactions. One project I want to get going in the town is a schools’ gallery, where children could come and do transcriptions of various artists’ work. Then they could take these back to their school and make a piece out of what they’ve done. They could then exhibit their own work in the same gallery in the week or so after the exhibition they have seen has finished. It would be a great way of making children feel that what they make is significant too, as opposed to being just another school assignment.’
 Leesa, who currently works with people with learning disabilities at Project Art Works in Braybrooke Terrace, has a long professional history in the creative arts, and as such she is able to draw on a range of techniques in her work. As she puts it, ‘Every little thing is part of a grand jigsaw. I do produce single objects, but I see that each of these objects is related to the other. I may take a photograph of something I have destroyed, make glass from something I have cast, or sculpt from a photograph.’
 This image of the jigsaw was a common thread in Leesa’s description of her life and work. Her maternal grandfather used to sift through blasted buildings during the Blitz, ‘piecing together the jigsaw of human remains that he found among the rubble’. Interestingly, her paternal grandfather, who bore a German surname, was shipped to the Faroe Islands as an enemy alien.
Leesa’s most notable exhibition to date was in the mid-nineties at the National Gallery. During her time as a student at Camberwell College of Art and Design, she was invited to make a creative transcription of one of one of the gallery’s paintings, and chose the Arnolfini Marriage by Van Eyck. She then cut up her piece ‘like a jigsaw’ and reassembled it in a different order. Her current work follows a top-up degree course at Hastings College, whose art department runs under the auspices of Brighton University. She says she’s had plenty of positive feedback about her work from the university’s external assessors, and is hoping to exhibit more widely in the coming months. Anyone interested in Leesa’s work can see more on her website, www.leesakotting.co.uk.

Ceramic shoes by Leesa Kotting

Ceramic shoes by Leesa Kotting

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