In hand that breaks the weather: Peyto, 2019, Raintree combines drawing with photographic and geophysical processes to evoke glacial activity within the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The work was produced during her residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada earlier this year.

Using regional sediment, stone, and ice on large format negatives in an analog photographic process, Raintree allows light, time and enlargement to reveal details that would otherwise be invisible. Gestures of pressure, dragging and depositing mimic the terrestrial formation of these substances, producing both a material residue and an image.

Raintree’s practice engages questions at the intersection of art, ecology, and human activity. She works across drawing, sculpture, and photography to make connections between human and geologic scales. This work is part of an ongoing series entitled hand that breaks the weather which explores the human impact on a changing planet and includes works on paper, ceramics, and cameraless photography.

Leah Raintree (b. 1979) lives and works in New York City. She recently held a solo exhibition at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, NY and has exhibited with the PhotoIreland Foundation, Dublin; High Line Art, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Prosjektrom Normanns, Norway; Montgomery College, Silver Spring, MD; and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. She has been awarded numerous artist-in-residence fellowships including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace and Process Space, Frans Masereel Centrum, Marble House Project, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Mildred’s Lane and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Raintree holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Parsons, the New School for Design.