Eileen Leonard Sealy explores how things, when brought into relation, are inevitably translated and distorted. Our senses interpret and digest experience, recasting it into something newly perceived. Through painting, performance and illusion, she investigates the intangible forces that might animate our existence, and the boundaries we construct to make sense of the world.
The title limecast brings together several meanings of casting: the shadow cast by light, the making of sculptures and masks, the casting of performers in theatrical productions, and the impressions of bodies preserved through quicklime in funerary archaeology. Lime also provides a material and conceptual thread connecting the work, from the historical development of paint and the construction of walls to burial practices and the invention of limelight in theatre.
Leonard Sealy stages performances using shadow puppets and sewn or cast effigies, exploring the elusive relationship between presence and absence, body and spirit. These encounters become the starting point for paintings developed in the studio. Drawing on Victorian diagrams of stage illusions, she examines how deception works, revealing the mechanisms behind the seemingly impossible.
Magic tricks hold a particular fascination: their playful, often comic spectacle conceals a deeper desire to believe that the laws of nature might be suspended. Perhaps this desire is bound to the equally impossible hope of immortality. Leonard Sealy's work moves between the childlike pleasure of illusion and the unsettling questions it raises about consciousness, continuity and what might pass from one life to another. Her paintings invite us to consider whether the divisions we impose on experience clarify reality, or obscure the mysterious connections that bind us to it.
All the works were made specifically for this exhibition.