"There is an emotional component involved in taking furniture apart. Sometimes an object is beautiful as it is, and until you have taken something like that and then ruined it because you cut it up or altered it in some way, that lesson can be hard to learn," Ellen Leigh, artist and creator of Modern Baroke says. I feel a similar dichotomy now as I choose which of the words she shared with me to pass to you. Her stories, like some of the furniture she works with, are whole and beautiful. And I want to weave them into something new and meaningful for you, but I hesitate to dissect them too much because some pieces are too good to take apart.

One story Leigh shared stuck out very strongly to me. Her landlady gave her some old wooden chairs from France that movers broke over 40 years ago. The chairs' quality prompted Leigh to think about their journey to her—they never would've met her if not for being broken. It was an emotional process for her to take them apart. It took a month to disassemble them. She studied how they were made, noted the care it would have taken, and removed hundreds of small, sharp tacks that were used in their construction. Pushing herself to be bold, she painted and drilled, and put the chairs in an "uncomfortable" and "unexpected" dialogue with plastic.

Leigh’s choice of materials, now deeply rooted in her love for the way objects hold history and reflect whether they were valued, originated in necessity. She began collecting discarded items to use in her art during her undergraduate days because she didn’t have much money. Though she later explored drawing, painting, and embroidery, those never brought her the same fulfillment. Ultimately, she was called back to her love of found objects during graduate school in her forties when a woodshop manager understood her true interests and gifted her a box of old chair parts. "The moment I started working with them, it felt electric," Leigh remembers. "As someone who has longed for family and to build a home, using the very materials that we create our domestic lives with felt natural and true to make my art with…I had found my voice."

In those early days, Leigh's art was treated as less valid. Today, she continues to challenge those standards through the techniques she utilizes. You'll notice methods often labeled as "girly" (like piecing, ruffling, and weaving) are present in her work, techniques that are devalued in society due to their association with femininity and decoration. She reflects on the concept of commodification and explains Modern Baroke is "not only about socioeconomic status but…about spirit and imagination in difficult circumstances."

When asked how her art has changed her, Leigh reflected, "My artwork has always challenged me to grow intellectually, conceptually, to learn new techniques, to evolve, to write more expressively, to present myself better, to be more curious about and observant of the world around me." She hopes viewers will take a moment to look at her work and ask, Why would she do such a thing? "In a world where we are distracted, less observant, and quick to make judgements, I want to make work that asks to be spent some time with and thought about," Leigh says.

I share in her hope that through her art, you "see that beauty is not contained to what we can afford but rather to our ability to reimagine."