About

Artist Statement

Sydney McLeod, currently located in Tulsa, OK. Draftsmen, bookbinder, occasional printmaker and painter.

My work is a study in self-ideation through a lens of chronic illness. It’s about language, suffering, mark-making, slipping, drowning, sparking, feral pain. It's about living through/with/as pain. Pain as companion/parasite/illness/betrayal/grief.  Pain that crosses the line between real and imaginary. Pain that relies on an intuitive relationship with the body, but often extends beyond it. 

The picture-plane/page becomes the place between and beyond corporal/non-corporal ideology that defines discussions on pain disorders. Illness and pain are both about and bigger than the body. So the work too becomes bigger than the body, and intimately reliant on it. The drawings take small moments of flesh and make them larger than life with an intrinsically complex system of marks. From page to page, the books slip between linguistic metaphor and blooming ink spots of a hip, an elbow, a hand. They use language and imagery in tandem to give pain a whispering voice.

Both drawings and books craft a language of suffering through mark-making, text, self-portraiture and abstraction of the body in a hope to understand, and perhaps even exorcize the emotional toil of a chronic condition.

Contact Information

Email me at haphazard.artz@gmail.com

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