STATEMENT OF WORK

Leonie Weber is a German-born, New York-based artist working across sculpture, performance, printmaking, and video. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the invisible and undervalued forms of labor – reproductive, domestic, and emotional – as well as themes of motherhood, womanhood, aging, and the ecological toll of consumerism. She often works with mundane or discarded materials such as cinder blocks, used denim, and cardboard shipping boxes, transforming them through strategies of aggregation and assemblage. Meaning in her work emerges not from a singular object, but through the interaction of many – stacked, sewn, glued, screwed, or digitally collaged.

Her most recent body of work is grounded in sculpture. One series, Bodies, features a series of deflated sculptural forms, installed within a roomscape constructed from cinder blocks. These ambiguous shapes – rendered in gray, worked-over surfaces – appear slumped or tired. The juxtaposition between handmade organic forms and mass-produced construction material underscores a tension central to Weber’s practice: the intersection of bodily vulnerability and systemic structures. A shared palette unifies the sculptures and blocks, drawing attention to their conceptual dialogue. The contrast speaks to the exhaustion, both physically and emotionally, within systems of productivity and control and invites reflection on the spaces we inhabit and the structures we build, uphold, or resist.

In a related installation titled Ghosts, Weber uses small battery-operated machines—cat toys, mixers, a coffee maker—partially obscured under layers of plastic bags, topped with translucent coverings. Placed upright on cinder block pedestals, these objects hum, rattle, and shake—some triggered by motion detectors. The animated forms suggest the presence of care work and the repetition of domestic routines. 

Another series of sculptures—formed from black-painted cardboard—combines industrial form with signs of collapse. While most pieces use crushed, shaped, and recombined box forms, some rely on grids and structural shapes that evoke modern architecture. Many appear arrested mid-collapse, slanting or folding under their own weight, hinting at systems on the verge of failure. These works reference the materials of everyday consumption and shipping while exploring fragility, containment, and entropy.

Her conceptual projects often offer tactile experiences: for example, free giveaway zines combining stories of online shopping with cross-continental family connections, or series of screenprints of hands in domestic scenes - holding dishes, a dog, a phone, or in tender kinds of touch - with a display of small personal objects.

Across materials and formats, whether sculptural, printed, or performative, Weber’s work constructs systems that reveal how the personal and political are entangled in the everyday—how bodies, objects, and stories all bear the weight of unseen labor.