Leo Boyd | What’s He Building in There?

In June 2022, screen printer Leo Boyd secured a 2 week exhibition at the Vault Canteen Gallery in Belfast. The gallery is part of a large artist-led multidisciplinary studios, and is currently running a year long program of members exhibitions with little oversight on the content of the work, except the nudge of encouragement to be creative and use the space imaginatively.

Leo’s studio in the Vault is a chaotic Aladdin’s Cave of screen print experiments on wood, paper, and metal. He tells us; “I could quite easily have put together a ‘What I Found In My Studio’ style exhibition but I thought that would be wasting the potential of the space and besides that I had an ace up my sleeve”. That ace was a giant pile of 1×1.5 meter thick corrugated cardboard that he inherited from an art gallery, taking up space in his studio, and waiting for the right time to transform into something new.

Thus far, most of Leo’s street art work has involved experimenting with paste ups, either using screen prints or cheap black and white digital prints to create cheeky pieces that play around with notions of print media and the use of scale within images. “There was always this itch at the back of my brain to make cardboard cut outs from paste up prints, and so combining the freedom of the Vault Canteen Gallery and the giant pile of corrugated cardboard were going to allow me to scratch that itch,” says the artist.

The first ever drawing Leo remembers creating was of himself lying down in a cosy front room full of sofas and 70s hi-fi equipment. Within that drawing Leo had drawn a smaller version of himself drawing in the cosy room full of sofas and hi-fi equipment. Cut scene, and he has now grown up a bit, or as he describes; “I have grown into the kind of person who wants to be a comic artist. Not because I was particularly good at it but because I loved the way that one drawing could seamlessly bounce to the next and to the next and the next as if they weren’t pinned butterflies but part of a sequence that would just keep going until the sequence ended. The artificiality of art is what I like.”

Leo then went on to partake in a BA in Bristol, where they had some “pretty fancy photocopiers”. Although students were supposed to buy credit to use the machines, Leo figured out a hack where he could get unlimited credit. He states; “I became obsessed by the idea that you could print a scale map of the whole entire world and wrap it around the planet, and that dodgy facsimile would contain us and within that us there would be full sized photocopies of us living out our full sized photocopy lives.” Cut scene once again, and computers have been invented, and it is these computers that have allowed Leo to communicate with printers in a way that wasn’t available when he had all the photocopier credit.

After completing his degree, Leo moved country and learnt to screen print. He describes; “The squeegee is going back and forward and I am thinking ‘This is brilliant. I am like a machine.’ And for a minute there I was as content as a photocopier.”

“The artificiality of art is what I like, but I like it to be obvious. I like to see the pencil lines, the offset registration marks, the machine wearing a ghost costume or the Wizard of Oz’s feet poking out from under the curtain. By exposing the artifice within itself the mise en abyme (the picture of a picture within a picture) perfectly captures this celebration of artificiality. We are all in (and in on) the joke.”

In his What’s He Building In There? exhibition Leo combined old computer monitors, rubbish photocopiers, screen prints, and differently scaled cardboard cutouts to create a series of interactive scenes within scenes, inviting the audience to become a part of the art work. Leo states; “In as janky manner as possible this exhibition explored what Nietzsche never said when he never said ‘Battle not with photocopiers lest you become a photocopier and if you gaze into the mise en abyme, the mise en abyme gazes also into you’.”

@leoboydprints
www.leoboyd.com

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