DESOTO
(Sean Prentice/Layla Glantz)
Desoto is Sean Prentice and Layla Glantz making joint work was a natural outcome of living and having a child together. Their collaborative work, as with other parts of their daily life, is an ongoing and sometimes difficult conversation between two separate and qualitatively different art practices. Sean Prentice is an illustrator with a strong grounding in painting and conceptual art. Layla is an installation artist who, by happy accident, discovered a talent for jewellery making, working primarily in copper and enamel. The resulting pieces are each unique and subtly unrepeatable for the process of fusing graphite to enamel is a blindfolded tightrope act. They have both fallen many times in the pursuit of perfecting this technique.
The creatures illustrated can be read as intermediators between humanity and nature, and may represent surviving fragments of a lost golden age…or a utopia yet to come.