Leah Raintree: the landscape is not still

Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA
February 28 - April 10, 2020

Staniar Gallery, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA
February 15 - March 18, 2022

Leah Raintree: the landscape is not still is an exhibition of photographic and ceramic works, engaging processes that shape the earth alongside shifts in time and scale. Raintree works with materials from specific sites, such as sediments, clays, and stone, in drawing methods that mimic forces within the environment. Central to the exhibition is the interrelationship between humanity and the planet, considering what is recorded within the earth and can be read.Works in the exhibition respond to sites ranging from glaciers in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, early industries of clay-rich Maine, and Raintree’s childhood connection to the rural landscape of Virginia. Raintree works through mark-making at the scale of the body that attempts to replicate phenomena that transcend human scale.

Several works were produced while Raintree was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, where she responded to glacial activity within the landscape. hand that breaks the weather is a series of cameraless photographs produced with collected sediment, stone, and ice applied directly onto large-format negatives, enacting glacial behaviors of dragging and incising with these materials. The residue of this process creates an image that is enlarged in the darkroom, with light, time, and scale influencing the final works. In the series Alberta, Raintree explores Alberta clay slip, which is mined regionally, achieving glassy greens in oxidation firings and rich ambers and purples in reduction, working with elements of temperature and atmosphere to transform this ubiquitous material.  

The exhibition also responds to the industrial and agricultural shaping of land. Raintree produced the series Clay Hill while in residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine. Established within a former brick factory, locally mined terra cotta was deposited onsite, creating a clay hill that has since naturalized into the landscape. Raintree embraced the impurities of the clay and the material’s history of extraction and relocation, producing tablet-like slabs that move between blocks of earth and pages to be read. Raintree emulates the process of extraction and depositing, dragging the material into strata-like layers that are influenced by glitches in the unrefined material. Related works in stoneware and porcelain work with industrially mined clays, oxides, and glazes in similar investigations.

Finally, Clearing is an intimate series of ceramic works that respond to the landscape of rural Virginia, where Raintree was raised on a small farm. These works serve as a meditation on humanity’s interconnection with the Earth, its cycles, and the profound ways that we continue to change it.

Leah Raintree: the landscape is not still premiered at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA in 2020 and was scheduled to coincide with MULTIVALENT: Clay, Mindfulness, and Memory, the 54th annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). In 2022, the exhibition traveled to the Staniar Gallery at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA.