painting with fire: 2019

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Exhibition at Michigan Medicine coming up

Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate

November 12, 2019

Work by Leslie Sobel will be featured in Michigan Medicine’s ongoing exhibit Gifts of Art: Bringing the World of Art & Music to Michigan Medicine. For her series, Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate, Sobel created mixed-media boxes meant to capture memories of places being altered by climate change. She drew inspiration from Tibetan iconography as well as her time as artist in residence at Kluane National Park in Yukon Territory, Canada where in 2017 she camped on an icefield with a group of climate scientists.The small boxes utilize paint, monotype, photography, resin and encaustic to invoke complex ideas and emotions that one can hold in their hands.
Shrines & Reliquaries: Memorializing Climate
December 16, 2019 – March 6, 2020
Open daily from 8:00am – 8:00pm
Gifts of Art Gallery – Taubman Health Center South Lobby, Floor 1
1500 E. Medical Center Drive
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Climate Change Game, mixed media in found box, ~3" x 16" x 2"

Kaskawulsh Descent, mixed media in found box

Mountain Shrine, encaustic in found box

Mountain Silhouette, mixed media in found box

Sheep Mountain & Kluane Lake, mixed media in found box

Monday, March 18, 2019

Materiality - resin and mixed media

Ever since my residency on the Eclipse Icefield I’ve been exploring ways to make work about climate in different ways. I’ve also started working in resin in the last year and it seems a natural material to explore ideas about melt and the change in lakes, glaciers and watersheds associated with climate change.

Kluane Lake Resin cast - resin and kozo with acrylic and pigment, ~24" x 50" ©2910

I’ve done a number of small, exploratory pieces as I work with resin as well - letting me try different techniques combining it with glass, metallic and other pigments and collage elements. Resin for me turns out to be a wonderful unifier of other media, pulling disparate elements together in what can end up a more polished, cohesive whole.

In the course of my explorations Art Resin gave me a small sample to play with. Support is nice as it’s not an inexpensive material and my larger pieces can go through quite a bit of it. I like their particular formulation - it’s non-toxic, doesn’t heat up as much as some other epoxies while curing and has been pretty easy to work with. I should add I have zero interest in working with anything but the non-toxic varieties of resin. My studio is in my home and material safety is an important concern.