Leah Watts
Image credit: One Night Spider Woman Weaves Herself an Invisible Web, 2021, handmade kozo paper thread, ink, photo and video performance documentation, by Leah Watts
About the Artist
Leah Watts is an artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal whose work explores memory, knowledge transmission and the Eeyou/James Bay Cree oral tradition through hand papermaking, beadwork, drawing, performance, and video. A recipient of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art at Concordia University, her work reflects on the ambiguity of sharing and withholding knowledge as well as the exploitative, generous or tentative relations that emerge as a result. Recent group exhibitions include Creation is the Opposite of Relic at Eastern Bloc (2022), Metamorphosis at the Atelier Galerie 2112 (2021), Imagined Topographies at the FOFA Gallery (2021), and A Practice in Healing at the VAV Gallery (2020). She has been a recipient of the Concordia Undergraduate Student Research Award in 2019 and 2020 and was a Milieux Institute Undergraduate Fellow as part of the Textiles and Materiality Cluster in 2021 for her ongoing research into Eeyou/Cree art forms.
