Leah Sutton is an interdisciplinary artist who practices visual poetics to question the materiality of the work. She uses light and shadow as a duality that connects the natural and artificial. With this duality and materials manufactured and handmade, she creates environments that beckon the viewer to consider other dualities such as light and dark, inside and outside, past and present, and private and public. Coming from a background in photography, her work seeks to fragment photography as a material and immaterial mode of traditional storytelling where it constantly battles the question of “will it disappear” and “if so, when?”

One example of these themes is expressed in ‘Looking Glass Insects,’ a component of the Of Light and Shadow: The Beautiful Nothings exhibition. In the photographic installation, she uses recycled tea bags she collected from over the course of a year as delicate textiles in which to print photographs onto. Each tea bag contains a mechanically reproduced image on a one-of-a-kind, stained tea bag. The act of dissecting the tea bags to remove the contents directly relates to the piercing of the tea bags with specimen pins. Each a unique specimen, the tea bags sway with the flow of air movement in the room. Through the progression of the exhibition, the images faded into the darkness with the glass window, rendering the photographs as nothing more than blurry boxes of ink.

The fragility of materials and the temporality of photographic installation and performance reinforce Sutton’s interest in the materiality of photography as an analog and digital medium. She explores themes that are heavily rooted in the history of photography in questioning photography as an art or science. These roots are explored through the material choices and the etymology of a photograph as a specimen that is forever preserved. The unnatural sense of preservation is ever-present in photography of the 21st century—“will it disappear” and “if so, when?”