Leigh Suggs (b. 1981, Boone, NC) is a Richmond-based artist whose practice exists at the intersection of craft, painting, and sculpture, engaging with the themes of perception, ambiguity, and transformation.
Her intricate works, created through a process of drawing, painting, and hand-cutting, transform the modernist grid into a site of tension and exploration, oscillating between positive and negative space, structure and fragility. Suggs’ process is deeply tactile and methodical, combining layers of painted paper with painstaking cuts that evoke woven textiles or radial webs. These patterns mutate and evolve, engaging with light, shadow, and reflection to create works that shift and transform with the viewer’s perspective.
Rooted in the tradition of process-driven, labor-intensive craft, Suggs reimagines the grid as a flexible and ambiguous framework, asking viewers to remain active participants in their experience of the work.
Suggs’ work is held in prominent public and corporate collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Deutsche Bank. She has exhibited widely across the United States, with solo and group exhibitions at venues such as the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Massey Klein (New York, NY), Abigail Oglivy (Los Angeles, CA), and Main Projects (Richmond, VA).
Through her explorations of material and process, Suggs creates works that act as meditations on endurance, fragility, and the risks of desensitization in an overstimulated world. Her practice invites viewers to engage deeply with the interplay of structure, pattern, and perception, offering a reflective space to consider their own relationship to form and the act of looking.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work oscillates between concealing and conceding, veiling and revealing. Embedded in the visual language of craft yet transcending the media-specific of painting or sculpture, my forms escape fixity while transfixing. But I invite you to remain active and look to the human forces behind the seemingly machine-made—behind the nature of the images themselves. Patterns and grids mutate into radial webs as forms yield to the tension between positive and negative space. Tension itself replaces form as the guiding principle of my works in paper: the familiarity of the grid gives structure to our experience while the hand-cut “warps” and “wefts” nod to the painstaking, processual work of “pink collar” art and labor. I reassert the modernist grid’s ambiguity through its making, remaking, and unmaking; what can we see when we look beyond the grid? The work emerges as timely meditations on concentration and the risks of desensitization, ultimately asking the viewer to consider their own relationship to form.
Created through a precise and distinctive process of drawing, tracing, taping and painting, hand-cutting, perpetual addition and subtraction, my work is simultaneously tactile and conceptual, methodical and instinctual. Through the manipulation of shadows, color and reflections, the intricate cut and seemingly woven patterns bring the painted paper to life, producing reflective surfaces and vibrant intense colors.
