"My work is not intended to look beautiful in the conventional decorative sense. Here, aesthetics performs a different function: it becomes a form of mass communication through which an effect is transmitted."
Artist statement
Leia Mocan's work resists the idea of art as decoration. Instead, beauty, discomfort, material tension, and symbolic form are used as channels through which environmental awareness can be communicated.
The practice addresses the environmental agenda across the entire production cycle: concept, development, making, and presentation. Works are built from upcycled or recovered elements not as a stylistic gesture, but as an ethical and conceptual commitment. They insist on the value of natural resources and on the need to shift consumer behaviour before damage becomes irreversible.
Recovered plastic, personal waste, illegally dumped material, found objects, recycled textiles, and sustainably sourced pigments all enter the work with their histories intact. They remain visibly marked by extraction, use, disposal, and neglect. In that way, each object carries a record of environmental violence while also being reactivated as part of a new visual language.
Recent projects also reconnect environmental thinking with migration, identity, language, and heritage. Romanian cultural memory, family narratives, and the experience of living in Ireland shape works that move between personal and collective histories. The aim is not only to critique the systems that produce harm, but to invite viewers into reflection, responsibility, and change.
The work centres the climate crisis, pollution, extraction, and the daily systems of waste that sit behind ordinary consumption.
Upcycled matter is not just a source of texture. It is part of the meaning, carrying both damage and possibility into the final form.
Recent works connect ecological questions with inherited language, womanhood, immigration, and Romanian cultural traditions.
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Read the statement, then step directly into the projects.
The redesigned project pages combine extracted gallery images and readable text so visitors can move from concept to artwork without getting lost.