For four decades, Leigh Salgado has maintained a rigorous studio practice dedicated to the ornate and the elaborate. At the core of her work is an almost ritualistic devotion to mark-making, but with a twist. The marks this artist makes become negative space as she draws with a knife. Cut paper is her calling card, harkening back to the papel picado tradition she grew up around in the San Diego area of California near the Mexican border.
Rather than stick with traditions, though, Salgado constructs an art of the present and future. Her formal training as a painter is always in evidence be it in her works on panel or her hand-cut wall sculptures. The subject matter she embraces orbits a central theme of the feminine and the many lacy, frilly, and ultimately passionate personas that universe contains.