London, United Kingdom
Leora Honeyman’s practice aims to raise cultural questions through speculative design.
By creating mixed-media objects of ambiguous purpose, she asks the viewer to imagine future cultural possibilities. Her processes embrace the digital realm as a starting-point, and introduce analogue crafting techniques to the deliberations of the machine; for example, juxtaposing foaming porcelain with precise, cnc-produced and moulded porcelain forms. Honeyman is interested in pattern, materiality and purpose as cultural markers, feeling that as an artist these are powerful tools to raise questions around diversity and acceptance.
The objects are intended as items of function, although it is understood that the use is ambiguous and that they may be viewed from a conceptual, sculptural or even decorative point of view. By creating objects whose use is improbable, she asks the viewer to imagine a heterotopia in which magic is embraced.
By employing digital tools as an aid to design the objects are also able to occupy the metaverse, where the digital influence allows impossibilities. The digital influence allows a precision to underlie the distortions of material process, in much the same way as environmental factors distort the blueprint of the natural world. With this in mind, the processes are multi-layered and attempt to achieve a similar paradoxical exquisiteness of form as that found in nature.
