In her presented work ‘Insiders’ Grave’, Leatherbury met with shareholders and stock market investors inquiring about their valuable items which they would like to be buried with. After their conversations, their chosen objects: two suitcases, a harp, a digital scale, a medical info sheet, and a set of keys are then plated in copper by the artist, and presented as premature artifacts of the speculative market.

Leatherbury is interested in the materials of economy and finance, made visible through their circulation within the infrastructures that surround us. Her interest in contemporary financial systems, legitimized by neoliberalism, manifests in thinking about individualism through these objects that hold personal values. Conversing with people who are directly involved in the stock market, allows Leatherbury to get intimate access to this system as they talk about their wealth, health, shame, and desires. While the chosen objects are mundane, the artist makes a carbon copy of them using copper plating, deliberately changing their makeup into a valuable metal. Copper is valued for its high conductivity without much loss of energy during current flows. It is a metal which is infinitely renewable yet is still being overly extracted, and which is involved in a speculative global economy. Leatherbury extends the potentials of the copper’s conductivity, by connecting the copper pipes found in thermal control plates, which are often used in computers and data centers to prevent equipment from overheating, extending their operational lifespan.

In her second work Incoming, Leatherbury explores another kind of social relation at a closer distance. Two laser lights, derived from the rotary laser used in construction and land surveying, are beamed into the building of the De Ateliers from the neighbours across the rear garden on Tweede Jacob van Campenstraat. One light falls into her studio, while the second one snakes through the whole building and falls on the plaque of the Rijksakademie directors in the foyer, which hangs as a remnant of the building’s original usage. The residents at the De Ateliers come to close proximity with their neighbours via the back garden. It is a loose space which is technically private but socially public, as sounds from the wood workshop and the gathered residents’ traverse into the neighbours’ homes. The laser sculpture is thus used as a vehicle for making contact with the neighbours with whom Leatherbury shares a view of the garden. She asks them if they are interested to be part of this installation, placing the light source of the sculpture within their private apartment, and in return can keep the laser-light structure as a gift. In the past 20 years, the neighborhood has witnessed a total redevelopment with a resulting gentrification of their street. With the lingering question of what could change next in the neighborhood, and at whose expense, Incoming materialises a momentary connection between the personal space of the current, perhaps, temporary neighbors. Beaming these lights into the De Ateliers becomes an act of touching a space which one cannot physically access.

Text Written by by Fadwa Naamna

Hard shelled stretch marks I’m thinking of zeros of carbon footprints and bank accounts together with smiles. What do you think these cultural ventures teach your children?, 2021
Copper platings of borrowed objects

13.42 grams. Grief, eclipsed fresh, 2021
Copper platings of a borrowed object

So of the things you’ve let go, the fact that this stays registers ah some sort of accompaniment between species, teleports across borders and friendships., 2021
Copper platings of a borrowed object

Incoming, 2021
Rotary laser, neighbors