In This Light

In This Light explores the malleability of perception and the fleeting nature of light. To describe something “in this light” is to suggest that our understanding of something could be changed under different circumstances: a different day, a different season, another person, another country. Drawing on time spent in the landscapes of Guatemala and Sweden over the past year, Leiva’s practice is rooted in the relationship between place, attention, memory and belonging. Having spent much of her life travelling, living and immersing herself in different cultures, her work brings together experiences and memories accumulated through encounters with the natural world. In This Light considers what it means to inhabit a place to which one is not ancestrally connected, while also carrying within oneself geographies left behind. The works reflect on how our sense of belonging is shaped not only by where we are, but by the places we continue to hold within us. Leiva's paintings inhabit moments of transition, particularly the shifting light of dusk and dawn. Alongside a curiosity for spaces between the familiar and the foreign, past and present, figuration and abstraction, Leiva’s practice embodies an awareness of the changing natural world. Marking her first body of work excluding the human figure, she questions what it means to view the landscape as subject rather than background. Having previously worked predominantly in monotype printmaking, In This Light marks Leiva’s first body of work made exclusively in oil. Working intuitively from memory and imagination, she builds up layers of paint before breaking them down with solvent, with processes of removal and dissolution integral to her work. This interplay of accumulation and erasure echoes her understanding of memory and looking: the ways in which landscapes, experiences and fragments of the past are continually gained, lost, and reimagined. This becomes particularly resonant with Leiva’s own experiences of migration, where places that shaped her have become physically distant yet ever-present through memory. Ranging vastly in scale, the works invite different forms of physical engagement. The smaller, more intimate canvases draw the viewer closer, while the larger paintings require a step back, establishing what Leiva describes as a “choreography” of looking. This shifting proximity mirrors our relationship with the natural world, in which our perspective is continually changing, shaped by distance, attention and movement.