Leigh Barbier

Mushroomville:

Mushroomville is an all female community existing under open skies dotted with occasional log cabins and brick buildings to provide shelter. Each woman enters Mushroomville through her own personal portal, tailored to meet her psychological needs for escape or transformation. Serving as metaphor for life’s duplicitous nature, the mushroom symbolizes the core of their culture.

Mushroomville is an internal emotional landscape I use to draw subject matter from but also feed psychological issues into. I created this imaginary space as a refuge from then profound melancholy I felt as my daughter entered middle school. Something about her departure from early childhood triggered a deep sense of loss within me for my own childhood.

Since that period I return intermittently in my creative life to that landscape using various mediums such as drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and animation. I perceive it as a place I will return to continuously, for short or long visits for as long as it’s narrative strength pulls me in.