Leonardo Drew

About

Drew’s new work for YSP’s 18th-century Chapel is a powerful reflection on the weight of collective experience, memory, and the cycles of life and death, decay and regeneration. This resonates within a historic building that is a site where lives have been played out for centuries. The central material is plywood – either blackened or covered with coloured and textured paint – which is ripped apart and shattered to create the building blocks for a monolith that rises to over five metres in height – like an explosion held in time. Drew’s fractured surfaces create their own language, embodying the laboured process of writing the artist’s and people’s experience into history. Resisting an overlay of explicit meaning, he chooses to title his pieces only with numbers in order “to give the viewer enough room to find themselves in the work”.