About Ursula Leach - A Member of Group 7

Ursula Leach

I walk and draw in the landscape almost daily. I also take photographs with a digital camera which acts as a sketchbook.  Drawing seems to me the first step to really seeing and understanding the territory.

To start with I just respond to the subject but as the work progresses in the studio the ideas and meaning develop.  The work is, to some extent, about current agricultural practices, but primarily is about the formal issues of image making. Pictorial structure and the edge of the image offer exciting scope to explore the

space and scale in a landscape of huge fields.  Colour is used in a way that is not realistic but the sum of colours used is intended to evoke a parallel to the atmosphere of the subject. 

However different those colours are from reality.  Placing one colour against another I hope to produce the feeling I need to recreate the intensity of a visual experience. The construction and space within the image is manipulated away from literality to imply distance, height and mass.  

Areas are made huge as a corollary to industrial farming. 

Things placed on the edge of the image indicate possible side-lining, disappearance, fragmentation.  Large areas of one colour imply bareness, aridity, erosion.

The paintings lead to carborundum prints which may in turn develop into other ideas for paintings.

I am also interested in buildings on the land, structures whose uses are sometimes obscure.  In places they seem to grow out of the land and in others they sit on top of it.