Baum & Leahy
Baum & Leahy is an international studio exploring biophilic, collaboratively-driven artistic creation through interactive installation, art direction, scenography and experience design. Their work explores modes of remediating interspecies relations as an integral methodology for collective survival during planetary climate crisis. Through research-led worldmaking and material storytelling, they question and sensorialise scientific inquiry into tactile, participatory experiences. With this they aim to allow the beholder a proximity to alternative realities, melting between the feasible and fantastical. Multisensorial ceremonies recur as an ongoing thread throughout Baum & Leahy’s research, where edible encounters and metabolic moments encourage digestion of entwined cross-disciplinary concepts and matter. Delving into the porous boundaries between bodies, species, materials and space these experiences aim to nurture sensitivity and symbiosis between inner and outer sensory worlds.
Since meeting at the Royal College of Art in 2015, Baum & Leahy have exhibited and run events internationally, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, The National Gallery of Denmark, Medical Museion, Roskilde Festival (DK), Somerset House, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wellcome Collection, (UK), Museum Het Valkhof, MU Hybrid Art House (NL), Centre for Book Arts (USA), Dansens Hus, Vega Scene (NO), Art Laboratory Berlin (DE), and MMMAD – Madrid’s Urban Digital Art Festival (ES). Baum & Leahy recently won the ‘Post-digital Landscapes’ Prize with Sensory Cellumonials. They were shortlisted for the Hedda Prisen 2022, Lumen Art Prize in 2021 and 2019, The Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Tech in 2019, and received both the Bio Art & Design Award and the British Library Labs Artistic Award in 2018. During 2020-2021 they were commissioned artists for One Cell at a Time, a public engagement program for the Human Cell Atlas. They were recently selected to be part of The Danish Arts Council’s career development grant "The Young Artistic Elite" 22/23, and are residents at BOM (Birmingham Open Media). Baum & Leahy are currently continuing their art-science collaboration with researchers at Medical Museion with a key focus on exploring sensorial representations of the holobiont.