Leonie Brandner invested in making ecosystems: installations in which the individual parts, objects, scents, texts, songs and video alike not only reference but dependent on each other. Her work is influenced by botany, feminist practices, by stories that are handed down from one generation to the next and a deep ecological concern for the care we return to the environment we are part of.
She cherishes the fragile, the delicate and tenderness as the vitality and determination of her practice. She works with textures, texture as stories, textures as something resonating in the hollow of the mouth, vibrating under the tips of fingers or as an aftertaste on tongues. And it is them, textures, that bring the various aspects of her work together in kaleidoscopical worlds on the edge of evaporation.
Leonie Brandner holds a BA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in London and a MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy in Den Haag. Over the course of her MA she became increasingly interested in plants, health and the stories we create to connect not only among ourselves but to the land, to past times and the future. To widen her practice she completed an advanced course at the University Zurich in Ethnobotany and Ethnomedicine in 2022. In September 2024 she published her first book in collaboration with the publisher Onomatopee titled ‘Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None’ on the history and mythology of the mandrake plant in Europe. And she is bringing her research of the mandrake into a contemporary context with an operatic installation for 50 singers of all ages in collaboration with Nina Guo, a piece called ‘If Only’. She currently live and work in Den Haag, the Netherlands.
Discipline
ceramics, textiles, installations, singing, writing, scent
Leonie Brandner makes objects out of everyday materials, she stitch, sings and writes. She is interested in material narratives, how things hold stories and how materials are tied up in narrative experience. She is invested in dreams and wishful thinking, as much as functionality and feeling like a necessary part of a system – in short she is interested in belonging, how we belong, how things belong to situations that are complex, confusing and at times impossible to understand with reason. Yet somehow, we all belong together – the loss, the hurt, the joy, the humans, plants, animals, rocks and minerals.