Leora Armstrong

BREATH OF PLACE

Community and the natural elements function as collaborators within my work. Time, weather, and loss are recurring themes, and the works that emerge from these journeys serve as extensions of the physical presence of sites. They record actions and moments in time—standing on iced waterways, for example, imprinting gestures that both recognize and mourn the surface’s fragility and disappearance. Weather, in its indifference and unpredictability, is a constant presence: a shapeshifting force that touches all places, silently witnessed yet deeply felt.

My ongoing project, Breath of Place, investigates touch as both a corporal and vibrational phenomenon. Touch is experienced physically through action, but also as resonance through sound. Allowing porosity between body, sound, and environment situates the self as a vessel—hinged to place through reciprocal exchange. By mapping these interactions, the work acknowledges permeability, records connection, and reveals an embodied cognition of touch. In doing so, it speaks to the fragility of ice, the impermanence of surfaces, and the broader erasures shaping our environment.