I'm Leah Swenson.
I am a visual artist living and working in Denver, Colorado, United States. I was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota in 1989. The landscape was very flat and the sky was very big.
I studied photography at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and completed my undergraduate education at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in 2013, earning a BFA with emphasis in photography and video art and graduating summa cum laude.
I've shown my work in Denver, nationally, and internationally, and I'm currently a member of the Artnauts art collective. I also belong to the Postcard Collective, and mail art has informed my practice for many years.
There are many types of landscapes.
Emotional, psychological, geographical, and physical. I create collage work from found paper along with my own imagery to construct these landscapes. I use encaustic wax, one of the oldest art practices, as a collage medium. I’m inspired by many contemporary and historic artists and movements, including the Mail Art Movement. My work often includes fragments of or harkens maps, which I’ve always been drawn to- the idea of mapping is very poetic to me.
Art has the power to communicate across barriers, borders, language, and time. In this way, art is a map. It can record where we have been, orient us to where we are, and point to where we are going.