Artworks by Leigh Witherell

My work is an exploration of what remains unspoken. Through figurative painting, I examine grief, intimacy, sensuality, and emotional survival, creating visual spaces where vulnerability is neither hidden nor diminished. I am interested in the body not only as a physical form, but as a site of memory, loss, desire, and resilience. Each piece becomes an attempt to understand how emotion lives within us, how it alters us, and how it continues long after language fails. The loss of my daughter in 2021 fundamentally transformed my practice. Painting became more than creation, it became a way of witnessing, processing, and surviving. My work does not seek to resolve grief, but to explore its continued presence and the ways it shapes our inner and outer worlds. Living with aphantasia has also deeply influenced my process. Without internal visual imagery, I create through feeling, instinct, and emotional truth rather than mental pictures. This has pushed me to develop a practice rooted less in replication and more in translation, an effort to give form to what is felt but not always easily seen. I paint to confront the quiet tensions we are often taught to suppress: sorrow, longing, sensuality, tenderness, fracture, healing. In doing so, I hope to create work that invites viewers not only to observe, but to recognise something of themselves within it. At its core, my practice is about presence. About making visible the emotional realities we carry, even when the world asks us to look away.