Handle With Care

To speak of the earth… as a living field of relationships between beings- each with its own openness or creativity- is to speak in accord with our senses, and with our bodily experience of the world around us…This primordial form of experience, which returns us from the pretence of disembodied detachment…engenders a new respect and restraint in all our actions. – David Abram

Lea-Anne Sheather’s current practice involves creating 2D and 3D textile, drawn and collaged art. She is interested in exploring the intersecting spheres of nature, the body and spirituality. Through meditation and by keeping an attentive sensory openness to the world around her she seeks a greater connection to nature and a perception of the enigmatic uniqueness of her surroundings. She is open to something subtly calling for her attention. This ‘calling’, she considers as the Other, which she believes we all possess and is the true, lucid spiritual self that is interconnecting and beyond familiar understanding. When something does call for her attention, she intentionally slows down, softens her gaze, and spends time with it, allowing her animal senses to engage. She describes how this sometimes allows, whatever is being observed, to reveal some facet of itself, or some spontaneous bodily experience to occur, to which she pays attention to. She believes this helps to engender humility, persistent wonder and sometimes even transcendence. She also believes that through developing deeper sensory rapport with all living things a better understanding of our interconnectivity develops which leads to more gentle intentions with all life forms.
Lea-Anne describes the stitching process as slow and time consuming. The time spent on a work changes her experience of it. The process time when making imbeds itself in the work like a time marker. The time spent opens her up to the subtle callings and calms agitations. Time itself no longer feels linear. It feels somehow more circular. It assists Lea-Anne to work at the right pace for her and not be pressured by the tyranny that linear time can present.
Handle with Care is a traveling exhibition. It has exhibited in Aratoi, Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, in Taupo Museum earlier this yearand From out of the Blue Studion and Gallery in Opunake, New Zealand. . It is hangind in Te Kōputu a te whanga a Toi, Whakatane, from September the 16th till the 2nd of November this year.

Her work is held in several private collections including the Wallace Arts Trust collection and Parkin collection.
Sheather completed a Master of Fine Arts at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2014.
Image: Lea-Anne Sheather, ‘Feeling Your Own Wingspan’ 2023, 1200mm x 1200mm