Artists

Leia Kathrene Vasara Brighton – Artist Bio

My name is Leia Kathrene Vasara Brighton I am an artist born in Shropshire in the UK and moved to New Zealand in 2002. I have a background in Theatre and Film, I completed a certificate in Performing Arts at Hagley in 2009 and a Bachelor of Arts double majoring in Cinema Studies and Theatre and Film in 2015.

I had my first exhibition in December 2022 with my collaborator Emma McClintok where we showed our mixed media work of photography and digital art.  

I developed my interest in photography during my BA when I discovered my love for film. Coming from a background in theatre I found studying film fascinating as a film can capture a moment in time for an eternity. Emma and I collaborate through my photography and her digital design, traditional paint and embroidery to capture a moment in time to evoke an ethereal and surreal memory of a space once familiar, that has crumbled into decay as a memory would slowly fade from consciousness.  

a thoroughfare – a liminal space in transition;

Leia Brighton and Emma McClintock utilise photography, photo manipulation and mixed media focusing on the emotional afterimage of a thoroughfare – a liminal space in transition; such as hallways, doors and windows. 

Leia’s photographary of locally ambiguous spaces, layered together by Emma with the addition of embroidery, digital design and traditional paint, helps create a visual nostalgia both familiar and forlorn, within these prints and physical medias. 

This series holds a focus on intermediary points- between the inside and outside, memories and reality, and what we see of these spaces from first glance. 

These slippery unfixed places can bring forth a atmosphere of apprehension or otherworldliness as seen out of context to their everyday existence, destinations normally brimming with life and movement are seen here without this extra stimuli, almost as a breath being held, a moment frozen.