Unbound & Beautiful: A Wearable Patch Workshop

Leo Pontius’ work is a ritual of building resilience, illuminating the power of the overlooked, and celebrating transness and gender nonconformity as liberating forces. He is fascinated by queerness as a verb - an invitation to meander past the boundaries of convention into a complex world of possibility and connection. Drawing from personal experience, mystical spiritual traditions, posthumanist discourse and lgbtqia+ history, his sculptural works span scale and slip between categories.

Textile techniques, such as basketry, embroidery, and sewing root the work in queer craft traditions. Materials like canvas, fabric remnants, photographs, and yarn are taken through alchemical cycles of accumulation, alteration, and reconfiguration. They are meticulously disassembled and slowly reformed to become simultaneously more complex and more cohesive. This material shapeshifting mirrors the ever-evolving nature of identity, becoming simultaneously more complex and more cohesive. The work moves at the pace of relationship, slow and deliberate, allowing discomfort to ruminate and wisdom to emerge. Each completed work becomes a sacred vessel, an invitation into the wisdom of queerness for everyone, regardless of identity.