Saskia Leek was born in 1970 in Christchurch and currently lives and works in Dunedin.  It is well known to followers of Saskia Leek's practice that her paintings exist in dialogue with a changing collection of images. These 'found paintings' - magazine cut outs and other random images - sit not behind but beside her painterly actions in a room of real material. In this room - her studio - Leek pushes ideas around to see what they say and do. Although she has often borrowed from Cubism, it was not for the style's geometric abstraction or the patch working of space, nor any styalisation of the past. Instead, Leek practises a prism effect - the notion that a small canvas panel can absorb and refract space, objects, imagery. Increasingly she allows for zones of intolerance in her work, where a blank space or indeterminate pool might linger suggestively alongside, say, a banana.  The potential of these carefully balanced hiatuses is palpable. They are in many senses the gap where the light gets in, and are a metaphor for painting's oldest provision - the window in the room. ("Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show" publication, Auckland Art Gallery, 2016)

Courtesy of Ivan Anthony.