BEN MCLEOD
Ben McLeod is an acclaimed Canadian sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans over five decades, marked by a profoundly self-propelled trajectory and the cultivation of a unique visual language. His comprehensive artistic output encompasses monumental sculpture, drawing, and painting. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1948, McLeod’s family immigrated to Vancouver in 1958, where his artistic awakening occurred in the 1970s. While intuitively engaged in carving wood, a family member recognized a latent talent, an observation that initially perplexed McLeod. This early phase culminated in his first stone carving, which was exchanged for a book on Henry Moore upon its acquisition by the same family member. This unexpected gift profoundly influenced him and ignited a lifelong interest in the practice and mediums of sculpture, altering his artistic trajectory. While largely self-taught, McLeod’s commitment to craft was rigorously honed through dedicated engagement with institutions including ACAD (now Alberta University of the Arts) and significant collaborations with distinguished artists such as Katie Ohe, showcasing his precision and profound mastery of industrial materials.
McLeod’s primary sculptural medium is metal, predominantly steel. From scrap yards across rural Alberta—including those near his base in Cochrane—he meticulously sources heavy-duty industrial and farming components, transforming them into commanding brutalist sculptures. His aesthetic draws heavily on brutalist principles—jagged edges, textured oxidized surfaces, and raw industrial remnants—yet always with a masterful sense of inherent harmony. Like David Smith’s welded steel compositions, McLeod’s works celebrate the material’s history and imperfections, forging complex forms that embody both immense strength and delicate balance. Beyond steel, McLeod’s repertoire extends to fluid, sensual forms carved from stone and wood, where he excavates the material’s underlying essence, allowing it to guide the finished work. He meticulously finishes these works, applying metal paint or burnishing with oxides, or allowing them to oxidize exposed to the elements, embracing the material’s inherent ruggedness naturally.
McLeod’s work consistently probes themes of resilience, the passage of time, and the dialogue between structure and movement. His sculptures, while abstract, often evoke or suggest forms—whether figures, animals, or machinery—through the viewer’s perception of balance and arrangement, akin to Gestalt principles. These forms, which can emerge from the mere placement of elements, like a face from a few drilled holes or the subtle outline of a male or female form, are frequently poised in tension or suggest captured motion. Designed for 360-degree viewing, each sculpture dynamically shifts and reconfigures from every angle, even from below, offering profound insight into McLeod’s unique spatial cognition and how he perceives and interprets the world around him. This highly developed three-dimensional vision is equally evident in his extensive drawing practice. His process is one of relentless exploration, characterized by iterative revisiting, refining, and overhauling concepts over many years. Minute adjustments can suddenly imbue a sculpture with palpable vitality, echoing the dynamic spatial presence of David Smith’s constructions or the raw architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, who revealed the fundamental truths of structures through stark honesty and unrefined materiality.
Currently based on an acreage in the Alberta foothills with commanding views of the Rocky Mountains, McLeod’s land transcends being merely a studio; it becomes both crucible and muse. Here, monumental sculptures, some weighing over a tonne and moved by bulldozer, are organically integrated into the landscape, fostering a poetic dialogue between nature and industry. This expansive, isolated setting cultivates the unhurried solitude crucial to his deep resolution of each work, which, as he describes, "speaks to him," guiding its completion. An essential element of his practice also lies in his extensive sketchbooks—repositories of explorations, potential configurations, and a multitude of possibilities for each sculpture. This rigorous iterative process culminates in works that often seem to possess an internal life, alive with inherent tension and motion. His acute sensitivity to the work allows him to discern its completion, recognizing instantly when an element is missing, even if its resolution unfolds over extended periods of rumination.
McLeod’s outsider stance—largely self-guided and deeply intuitive—frees him to forge a profoundly personal visual language. His relationship with his diverse materials—steel, stone, wood, and paint—is rooted in philosophical honesty and an acute responsiveness to their inherent qualities. His sculptures are the culmination of patience, precision, and an intuitive dialogue with the materials themselves, profoundly nourished by the expansive landscapes that define his existence.
McLeod's work stands as a testament to patience, precision, and acute responsiveness to material. This inaugural exhibition in Vancouver, his childhood home, marks a singular opportunity to experience the profound, intuitive sculptures of this pioneering Canadian artist.
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