Essay: Deanna Leamon

Shroud 2, 2007

Mixed media

60 x 40 in

DEANNA LEAMON

by Wim Roefs

2007

Deanna Leamon’s work is about humanity and its flip side, inhumanity, inflicted by humanity upon itself. For her current Shroud series, the impetus came from photographs of Iraqi war victims wrapped in cloth. 

Leamon collected newspaper photographs about Iraq, mostly from the New York Times, for two years straight. At some point, she says, the Times began showing wrapped, dead Iraqis. “I didn’t base my drawings on specific pictures, because there were so many. I ended up wrapping models in fabric and wrapping skeletons for direct source material.”

“To shroud,” she says, going into dictionary mode, “is, one, to wrap a corpse in burial clothing and, two, to shut off from sight; to screen. The noun form refers to, one, a cloth used to wrap a body for burial, and, two, something that conceals, protects, or screens. Synonyms include to block, hide, or obscure, with the shared central meaning ‘to cut off from sight.’ This evokes what our government does not want us to see and especially doesn’t want us to count – Iraqi casualties. It’s, of course, murky. But a study from Johns Hopkins University last October put the Iraqi casualty figure at 600,000. Since then, who knows?”

The current drawings, Leamon says, continue her concern with individual suffering as a consequence of large bureaucratic exercises of power. “I continue to explore new ways to extend drawing and to make the drawing medium serve the artistic message.”

The Shroud series demonstrates the trademarks of Leamon’s work. She uses great technical skill to create expressive art, typically large graphite or mixed-media drawings that have an immense emotional impact. She combines high formal qualities with unsettling content and imagery. 

In gross anatomy paintings a few years ago, Leamon treated skeletons less as corpses of dead people than the remains of people previously alive. A skeleton with a heart or with an expressive face, including eyes, gave the corpses a still-human touch. In Leamon’s technology drawings of the 1980s, featuring naked figures, she addressed the often-faceless tyranny of bureaucratic power and the disorientation of people lost and displaced by the abuse of technology.

In her widely and nationally exhibited early 1990s Hamlet series, 10 drawings addressed a 1991 disaster in a Hamlet, N.C., chicken-processing plant. When a fire broke out, 25 minimum-wage workers died because the plant’s owner had locked eight of nine exits to keep workers from stealing chickens. The large, monumental charcoal figures on a white background had a sculptural quality that is echoed by the bodies in the Shroud series. The Hamlet figures’ nakedness and unclear race and gender obscured their background, giving them a universal quality, as do the shrouds in the current work. Abuse of power, Leamon seems to suggest, can affect us all. 

The Hamlet figures appeared trapped, literally by how Leamon placed them in space, and figuratively, as obvious helplessness signaled pending death. The Shroud corpses are trapped by space, too, but more so by their wraps and demise. “The images may serve to remind us,” Leamon in the 1990s wrote about her Hamlet drawings, “that these people were real people, not abstractions or statistics.”