Will McLeod is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living in Hudson, New York. Will primarily works within two mediums: paintings on paper and with machine sewn textiles. The paintings are modest in size but potent in composition. The textiles are masterful opuses of craft.
McLeod imagines relational spaces that attempt to lasso his disjointed references. The works are jarring and poetic mash-ups of gesture and abstraction, intuition and foresight, memory and disassociation. McLeod’s kitchen sink mentality reins supreme.
The paintings Will creates are primal and moody. They depict observations of his life’s surroundings and feelings, told through an evolving cast of colors, figures, and symbols. Will’s defined and bold mark-making ground the nonrepresentational aspects of his pictures and lend an illustrative narration to these heady and murky vistas.
The textiles McLeod sews and maps out are direct versions of those paintings. Will utilizes his skills learnt from a professional background in fashion design & development to bring these 2-D paintings to life. He interprets the gestural and spontaneous nature of the works on paper and transforms them into meticulously planned, seamed cloth panels that look like a conventional painter’s finished canvas or soft stained-glass assemblages.
McLeod strives for his art to exude a quality of equanimity between method and magic, an in between-ness where the works exist just for themselves. He creates pieces that glorify and illuminate process and composition so that the viewer can see the truths of the methods, materials, and humanistic nature of artmaking while also being vague enough that the viewer can find their own truth.
