Art Gallery

Leonie King has been a lecturer in printmaking and an organiser of print exhibitions in Galway such as ‘Western Artists’ and ‘Akin’. She was a founder of Impressions Print Triennial. Her work is in many private and public collections.

Her inspiration comes from an interacting of the emotional with reflections of the surrounding area, both present and past. The effervescent colour changes of the sea and land transpose themselves into multi-layered prints that are responses to a communing with soil, rock, and that which ekes out an existence on it, and underneath the surface of the earth.

An awareness of the past transparently overlaid on the present is part of the underlying notion of her work and pertains to the sense of eternity, stretching both backwards and forwards. Her work is an endless balancing of dynamics, of coloured texture over variant coloured texture.

Piercy's work has received recognition nationally and internationally via numerous awards and exhibitions. She has exhibited worldwide in galleries such as the Royal Academy, London; the Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Pallazzo Poli, Rome; Museo Nacional del Grabado, Argentia; Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, and the Donna Beam Gallery, Las Vegas to name some.  A one-person show, 'Foreign Bodies' was featured as part of the visual art programme for the Galway International Arts Festival in 2015. She has received awards from the Royal College of Art, London; the British School at Rome, the International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland; the Printmakers Council of Britain; amongst others. Her work is represented in major collections throughout the world- the Ashmolean, Oxford; the Instituto Nationale Per la Grafica, Rome; Churchill College, Cambridge; Arts Council of Ireland; Columbus College, U.S.A.

Piercy uses the materials and practices of book binding to create sculptural objects of delicate balance. In so doing, she plays with all that books mean for us and deconstructs them as signifiers for our endeavours of self-interpretation: as sites where ink marks on paper embody our efforts to construct meaning.