about the artist

Solange Leon is originally from Chile where she trained initially as an architect at the University of Valparaiso school of Architecture & Design and then further at Brighton University. She practiced as an architect for many years whilst also working on public art projects and pursuing her own work as an artist. She is an interdisciplinary artist, co - director and founder of award winning Artichoke Artgroup.

Her recent work on urban landscapes represents her long standing fascination with the relationship between spaces and those that inhabit them, the elemental influences and transience or permanence of built spaces.

Her training as an architect strongly influences her work and her passion for drawing, as she feels the liveliness of linework helps her weave the complexity of the movement of our built environment. She strongly believes in inhabiting the place that you are representing in order to convey the unfathomable character that makes the experience of any place so unique. She has an astute sense of movement and study of the relationship between that which does and does not alter.

"My work is not a cognitive analysis or a reflection on urban landscapes, but more a contemplation of a moment, the recording of an ephemeral memory in drawings. I think of it more comfortably as a suspended poem. The city is one, yet all our individual experiences are different. They are subject to the mood, the light, the sounds and acts that make the meaning of 'place' so distinct.

The weather is one of the important transient components that affect my work as I like working in the streets, like when I was a student. I draw in the wind, in the rain, in the sunny places but also in the dirty ones. Like train stations, a transient, noisy, cold and dirty space that the drawing conveys, but that does not lack in beauty. More than once I’ve had to battle with grit, dirt, pigeons and dogs, not to mention the hustling and hassling people that are ‘bloody annoying really’- not that I have the right to get annoyed being in a public space after all. Oweeee how cute, a whole puppy school and their charming owners surround me enthusiastically in the square...The weather is in fact the easier and more enjoyable factor to engage and play with..."