About

Artist Statement

Sydney McLeod is a charcoal artist, printmaker, poet and bookbinder working out of Tulsa, OK. Their work uses drawing, bookarts, and poetry to investigate the relationship between body and identity through the lens of disability and queerness.

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My work is the place between body and identity. I use drawing, craft, and intentional labor to create spaces that foster a more unified relationship between the ideation of self and physical presence. This work takes the form of installation, bookart, monolithic figurative drawing, poetry and carefully layered black pastel voids.

 This work is rooted in coming to terms with my own relationship to a body that is haunted by chronic pain, sensory overwhelm, and gender dysphoria as a queer, autistic and chronically ill individual. At some point in all of our lives the body becomes a point of contention, and working to find a home in the space that holds your very being becomes a necessity. My practice creates a place to confront the complicated nature of the relationship between identity and body in order to find ownership of the body as symbiotic to our existence.  Recognizing this relationship's importance and reckoning with its discomfort is inherent to protecting bodily autonomy. My work offers a starting point to those that left their body behind in the everyday miasma.

Contact Information

Email me at artandprints@sydneymcleod.com

Images Courtesy of Molly Shanahan: https://www.instagram.com/moldyshan/