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A Conversation with Artist-in-Residence, Leah Raintree
Leah Raintree (she/her) is one of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Spring/Summer 2025 Studio Access Residents.
Leah Raintree is an artist based in Richmond, VA and Brooklyn, NY. Her practice focuses on the human connection to earth, with an interest in how we frame and experience time, matter, scale, and phenomena. Her work is rooted in an experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with materiality and place. She primarily works across drawing, ceramic, and photographic processes, often using site-specific materials to explore our interconnection with the planet.
Leah is based in both Richmond, VA and Brooklyn, NY. Her practice focuses on the human connection to earth, with an interest in how we frame and experience time, matter, scale, and phenomena. Her work is rooted in an experimental drawing practice that spans media, with projects developing through a combination of process-based mark-making and direct engagement with materiality and place.
She primarily works across drawing, ceramic, and photographic processes, often using site-specific materials to explore our interconnection with the planet.
Towards the end of Leah’s residency, we caught up with her to hear more about her series of works, Legible Earth. You can find the embedded video’s transcript below.
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Creating The Fire Tapestries is a way of ensuring that the stories of climate change don’t go away; that these human experiences are essentially being recorded in real time. Hi, my name is Leah Raintree and I’m a visual artist. I work through an experimental drawing practice that spans media and thinks about the human relationship to time and the Earth.
So during my residency, I’ve been working on a project called Legible Earth: The Fire Tapestries. It’s an extension of an ongoing project called Legible Earth, which thinks about the inscriptions left by climate change. The Fire Tapestries, mark the ten year anniversary of The Valley Fire, when my sister and her family lost their home in 2015. It borrows from the language of ancient tapestries that survive as storytellers.
After my sister was able to return to Northern California, her children and her collected char for me and sent it back for use in my studio. I think a lot of the work that I’ve been making is thinking about, you know, what are the artifacts from our time? Maybe it’s the job of artists to record histories like this.
Learn more about Leah + her work: Instagram: @leah.raintree / Website: leahraintree.com
Interests and opinions expressed by artists-in-residence are their own. Learn more about VisArts’ organizational values and code of conduct.