Biografia
Menace and nature, climate change and credit crunch, creation and civilization, repossession and rehabilitation, geopolitics and gender inequalities… These can all be interpreted as manifestations of chaos.
Leukefeld’s research into chaos and its destructive forces as well as multiple possibilities for new creations have informed her work on both philosophical and poetic levels over the past ten years.
She is particularly interested in the earliest myths and creation stories, such as those recorded by the Greek poet and scholar Hesiod (c. 750-650 BC), for whom Chaos was the first entity.
The writings of Stephen Hawkins, James Gleick and Edward Lorenz (who in 1961 discovered that ‘small changes in initial conditions produce large changes in the long-term outcome’) also inform her work.
Leukefeld’s art practice encompasses drawing, sculpture and temporal sculptural installations. On occasion, she uses live performance or performance to camera. She aims to produce new work for every exhibition.
Her minimal ink on paper drawings comprise a steady stream of documentary fragments of events, conversations, impressions recorded from real-time experiences, reused newspaper articles and TV. The artist is always aware of the closeness of chaos as she searches for patterns and abnormalities in the form of chaotic turbulences, sometimes creating them herself by juxtaposing images and text from different sources.
Leukefeld’s installation work is often site specific or site related. She makes a detailed investigation of the exhibition space, and then transforms her findings, applying ideas from the sciences and widely shared sources in the new fine-art context. Lately this approach has led to the creation of complex installations.
Knotting and weaving thin wire around paper is a technique to create figurative sculptures that make up her recent installations. She reads recycled newspapers and magazines from cover to cover before the contents – part of constant and torrential amount of intelligence – is used like upholstery, to form the inner construction and thus contain and restrain the overwhelming amount of contrary tidings of our civilization.
Leukefeld was born in 1967 in Halle/Saale, the former GDR and has lived and worked between Germany and the UK for the past two decades. Since graduating from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and receiving her MA (Sculpture) from the University of the Arts London, Leukefeld has initiated and curated many diverse art projects and artist-led exhibitions. In 2014, she organized and curated the artist-led I. MKH art biennale under the title of 'Contemporary menagerie of visual philosophers'.
She has presented her own work widely, including at the Southbank Centre and recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the German Embassy in London. She has exhibited in Greece, Italy, Sweden, Germany and the UK and her work is represented in public and private collections in London, New York, Athens, Halberstadt and Berlin.
