Under the Same Sky (even though it is likely your sky looks and feels entirely different to mine from where you are standing) is a showcase of new work by Brighton based artist Solange Leon Iriarte.

Solange was the winner of this online exhibition, which was offered as part of an auction for animal conservation charity CIWY to raise funds to relocate one of their sanctuaries in Bolivia.

Movement has been a primary part of Solange Leon Iriarte’s practice. Throughout an MA in Sustainable Design, her detailed observational moving landscapes have given way to more abstract gestural art, a form of embodied response to ideas. Each of the four collections in Leon Iriarte’s online exhibition examines a different facet of sustainable design and complexity – the artwork explores division, borders and movement in a social and cultural framework. It highlights the environmental crisis and the challenges of balancing collectivity and individualism.

Click here to view the exhibition

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Artist and Designer Solange Leon Iriarte has a multidisciplinary background and range of interests. She uses film, writing, drawing, cyanotypes and other mixed media in her restless interrogation of themes such as continuity and rupture, identity and belonging, stability and transformation. Her work is characterised by an embodied spontaneity and sense of play, anchored by intellectual precision. Movement is central to her practice – the physicality of the making process, the tectonics of thoughts and ideas, the shifting shapes of the body as it moves, alone and with others, through space and time.

Originally from Chile, France and Scotland, and now settled in Sussex, she often returns to ideas of geographical movement and dislocation. The experience of growing up in the Andes, under the shadow of a dictatorship, has infused her work with a quixotic curiosity, with hints of magic realism, as well as an unflinching political dimension. Her Sustainability studies are driven by a belief in the connectedness of all things, and the power of the creative process as a tool for learning, communication, compassion and conflict resolution.

Solange is a mother of one, a lover of cities and nature, animals, yoga, music and art. She is on the advisory board of Forests Without Frontiers, a charity rewilding the ancient Carpathian forest in Romania. This June she was awarded the Experimental Design Practices Prize 2021 and the John Andrews Drawing Prize in June 2020. Previous studies include opera singing at the National Conservatoire of Modern Music in Santiago, Architecture and Urban Design at The Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile, and Architecture and Printmaking at the University of Brighton, UK. She has exhibited at ONCA and Cameron Contemporary Gallery in Brighton, Jaggedart in Marylebone, London, and her fastidiously detailed cityscape drawings are held in many private collections.

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