I began my arts practice as a painter in 2009. At that time I showed my work on the street. A few years passed this way until the beginning of 2013. From then until the end of 2015, I worked on a piece which is only ever shown in person and in solitude. It has formed the basis for my practice since, much of which is documented here.

After that, I was exhausted so I travelled for a while to recuperate. I had many adventures, like the time I was stung by a venomous scorpion climbing the sacred waterfalls of a holy mountain; the time I got lost in the desert; the time I cut my foot open on the highway and pretended to be a pilgrim in order to get a ride, and wound up taking part in a pilgrimage despite myself; swimming in a great white shark spawning bed, covered in goat fat; and so on.

While few of these adventures were in fact recuperative, they are treasured memories and inform my way of working. Contemporary art is often posed as a conversation, but to me it’s more like a journey.

Anyhow, one day in Greece, prowling naked among the boulders and sage, I remembered a dream I had once about paintings made of bronze and melted colonial antiquities. I went back to Toronto and started making them in 2016.

This led to a collaboration between myself and a computer scientist, and separately with a group of musicians. It would also form the basis for a more recent digital work about history.

In the Spring of 2018, I was approached to work as an artist and consultant for a new building being erected in Toronto. For this, I made a giant metal calendar describing 1000 days of Toronto’s weather. This was an effort to blur the lines between people’s lived experience and the landscape. I have since created a second architectural calendar further exploring these themes.

Beginning around this time, I also began a series of interesting jewellery projects and commissions which would continue through 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. I recalled something that a friend had told me about jewellery being a kind of transformative storytelling, and began to treat commissions as such. This helped me further refine my approach to being-of-service through my work.

Recently, I have been working primarily on commissioned works that mark important moments in my clients’ lives, especially regarding love and death - such as this figure of a violin player and this figure of a basket weaver. Meanwhile, I have been making jewellery to serve the same purposes for my clients. Another commission at this time was to make a pedestal that would hold a scroll that in turn would hold the names of 17000 dead people during a choral reading.

I have also been developing my repertoire of both archaic and futuristic techniques, ranging from antiquated bronzecasting methods to digital sculpting and working with AIs. I’ve used these techniques together in pieces like this seated figure.

Meanwhile, I’ve also returned to one of my first practices as an artist: illustration.

I am currently developing a number of projects while focusing on bronze statuary. I have found it to be a good medium to proprioceptively explore interiority, identity, and selfhood from the perspective of a mystic, craftsperson, and storyteller. A recent grotesque piece explores the concept of prayer, spiritual hygiene, and dirtiness through the same lens.

I am now looking for opportunities to make larger, more ambitious, more delightful artworks in Canada and internationally. Alongside my private commissions, I aspire to make make meaningful, honest public work that is in the service of my society, as well as people 10,000 years ago, people 10,000 years hence, and the landscape itself. In keeping with this, I am looking for ways to take responsibility for and be of service to the upcoming generation of artists.

I wrote this in Toronto while the sky was grey and orange from the forests burning in Quebec. A few days before that, it had smelled like steaming cedar - but now, it smelled like roads on fire. And that is the story so far.

- Leo