Rosie Leventon makes sculptural installations, both indoors and outdoors, using a broad variety of materials from human hair to recycled central heating pipes. She also draws and paints, using ink, pencil, acrylic, chalk, bitumen and other media to create proposals for sculptures and installations. Although often conceived as outline ideas for larger three-dimensional projects, these drawings and maquettes represent a significant body of work in their own right.

Some of Leventon’s installations comprise radical interventions into the interior architecture of a building. She has constructed false floors that float on water and which shift under foot. Her outdoor installations, sometimes highly…

Rosie Leventon makes sculptural installations, both indoors and outdoors, using a broad variety of materials from human hair to recycled central heating pipes. She also draws and paints, using ink, pencil, acrylic, chalk, bitumen and other media to create proposals for sculptures and installations. Although often conceived as outline ideas for larger three-dimensional projects, these drawings and maquettes represent a significant body of work in their own right.

Some of Leventon’s installations comprise radical interventions into the interior architecture of a building. She has constructed false floors that float on water and which shift under foot. Her outdoor installations, sometimes highly ambitious in scale, often have a functional, regional element, providing water for animals, for example, or promoting biodiversity and regeneration.

All of Rosie Leventon’s work, however, is grounded in a sensitive concern for the natural environment and how we inhabit it, how we use it and interact with it. Leventon sees her work as ‘interweaving a kind of personal archaeology with the archaeology of contemporary society and the physical archaeology of places.’

Much of Leventon’s sculpture incorporates elements of surprise or wryly mordant humour, but there is also a muscular quality to some of her installations, which carries its own freight of symbolism. ‘Forensic Evidence’, a piece first shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery, comprises a series of recycled scaffolding boards stacked together, from which an elegant, wound-like indentation has been hacked, while ‘False Floor’ is constructed from old scaffold boards punctured with ragged holes from which water spurts, splashing the surrounding boards. Such pieces possess vaguely menacing connotations, as if one has inadvertently strayed into a place where some catastrophic event has taken place, the inhabitants long since departed. Leventon has said that this series ‘may be a response to a recurrent dream I have of a subterranean chamber filled with dark moving water.‘

Leventon’s drawings combine expressive energy with a sculptor’s instinct for ground and depth. Surfaces are scratched, incised, scribbled upon; paint is dribbled, dabbed, scumbled and dragged. The surfaces are tactile, often evoking organic sculptural materials or referencing the elemental aspects of landscape.

A graduate of London University, Croydon College of Art and St Martins School of Art, Rosie Leventon has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rouse Kent Award for Public Art, the Mark Tanner Award for Sculpture and British Council Travelling Awards. Her work has been shown internationally.