About Misti
Misti Leitz
Misti is a non binary UK based sculptor, working mainly in wood.
Following a highly successful thirty year career as a designer, Misti began working with her hands and making abstract sculptures in 2016.
She is a perfectionist, which means she lives her life in pursuit of something she can never truly attain, but is nevertheless driven to keep trying anyway. She believes in striving for excellence in everything she does and spends way too much time masking her disappointment in the results she achieves. Despite this, the creative process is, for her, a constant source of delight.
In 2021, she starred in, and won, Channel 4’s televised woodworking competition, earning herself the highly dubious title of ‘Britain’s Best Woodworker’, and introducing a worldwide audience of millions to her work.
She lives in secluded bliss with her partner and two unruly dogs in a ramshackle cottage in the woods just outside Ludlow, in Shropshire.
Sculpture
In 2003, Misti made her first piece of abstract sculpture that encompassed and expressed all of her feelings about her son’s impending birth.
At the time, the significance of this small piece went un-noticed, as she was still working as a designer of Interiors and bespoke furniture, and in the following years she produced countless sculptural pieces for her clients as she continued to expand her portfolio of commissioned works. As a designer, she always felt it important to have practical experience in making, to better inform her designs, and so over the years she acquired some basic skills in the working of wood, metal, stone, glass, plastics, plaster and paint.
In 2016, feeling that she had taken her skills as a designer to their furthest extreme, and yearning to work more with her hands, she set up a studio and workshop to concentrate on making contemporary sculpture and objets d’art.
Working mainly in timber and stone, and often recycling found or discarded materials, Misti makes abstract works that comment on her own situation and environment, and express her thoughts and feelings about them. In direct contrast to her training as a designer, where every last detail of a commissioned piece needs to be rigorously planned from the outset, she will often start a sculpture with no drawing or particular direction, allowing the material itself to guide her until it reaches a point where she can start to consciously refine the form that has begun to appear, and to give it meaning.
Her primary focus is in imbuing her work with a sense of energy and character, further refining the visual language she unwittingly began to develop in 2003, and using flowing organic forms to give a sense of vitality to her work. The pieces she makes often feature combinations of contrasting material or colour, and the amount of time she spends smoothing and finishing each one results in sculptures that are informed as much by touch as they are by design, giving them a sensual tactility.
Misti’s innate feeling for form and volume comes from working with period architectural masterpieces of figurative carving whose inspiration is largely the natural world, and yet much of her own inspiration comes from a more transient source. For her, it is the shapes seen in flames, in flowing water, and at the edges of our peripheral vision; shapes seen in clouds and wisps of smoke; shapes seen in dreams or on the insides of our eyelids when we’re tired. It is the capturing of these ephemeral forms that fascinates Misti – solidifying the ethereal, while at the same time attempting to convey the essence of their movement and fluidity.