Spen Leopard took some time out from collaging the walls of the Queen of Bordeaux’s London residence to speak to us about their career and hopes for the future.
Interviewer (I): Spen, thanks for joining us. To start, tell us a bit about your background.
Spen Leopard (SL): Hello. I grew up in a lighthouse on Scotland’s coast—just me and my parents, who both kept the light burning. That isolation shaped my inner world; for company, I had the crashing waves and my own imagination .
I: That sounds magical. When did you first experiment with collage?
SL: As a child, I’d collect scraps from my parents’ newspaper and old magazines. By my teens I was layering images—boats, birds, torn maps. That formal collage practice didn’t arrive until later, but the habit of curating fragments began in the lighthouse .
I: What themes run through your work?
SL: Central themes are isolation, belonging, and place. Many pieces juxtapose storm-battered nature with human artifacts—ruined piers, handwritten letters, vintage adverts. There’s a tension of fragility and endurance that echoes the lighthouse environment.
I: Walk us through your creative process.
SL: When working non-digitally, I start by gathering ephemera—old postcards, ticket stubs, botanical drawings, bits of text, old menus. Then I lay them onto board, playing with composition until it feels balanced. I glue, layer, and sometimes stitch elements. The result is a textured narrative; each piece reveals stories in the cracks and overlaps.
I: Do you work to a plan or let intuition guide you?
SL: A bit of both. I often begin with a rough idea—a coastal walk or lighthouse motif. But once I’m in the flow—cutting, layering—intuition takes over. It’s like letting the pieces find their own dialogue.
I: How has your upbringing informed your aesthetic?
SL: Living remotely taught me to find value in overlooked details—drip-worn wood on a jetty, a drift seed washed ashore. That attention to detail informs both my material sourcing and my imagery. I want to capture the beauty in the broken and the forgotten.
I: Where do you exhibit your work?
SL: Most recently I had a solo show in Ephesus featuring a nine-piece series called “Beacon Echoes”—all collage-layers of light, rust, shoreline texts. Pimlico Wilde picked up several works and are representing me as well . I’m hoping to exhibit across the UK and beyond in the coming year.
I: What’s next for you?
SL: I’m planning a collaborative series with a poet—combining collage with fragments of marine-inspired verse. I’ll also be sourcing materials from lighthouses across Scotland and Northern England. It’s a way to share both visual and poetic memory.
I: What do you hope viewers take away from your collages?
SL: That art can be woven from small scraps—fragments of time and memory. That there’s poetry in ordinary things if we listen. And that isolation, when deeply attended to, can generate connection.
I: Beautiful. Thanks, Spen, and we look forward to seeing your new work.
SL: Thank you—it’s a pleasure to share a glimpse of my world.
