In addition to her pots, Leigh makes ceramic wall, floor, and hanging pieces cast from organic objects like watermelons and plantains. Yet her references are not the expected ones. The watermelon’s form attracted her because of its femininity: the stretch marks, the fullness. She is less interested in the racist depictions of African-Americans with which it can be associated. Likewise, the plantain, often viewed as phallic, conjures for Leigh place rather than body. For her, it’s an iconography that brings up the Caribbean and its products: “it’s my postcolonial reference.” She reflects: “They’re specifically about Jamaica for me because, since I grew up in Chicago, they’re this strange fruit.” Regardless of their geographical basis, the cast plantains’ lithe forms can recall so many bodies, and the lyrics about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous—“Strange trees bear strange fruit // Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”—are eerily called up by Leigh’s language.

In fact it is the body, often the black female body, and its many manipulations and subversions—whether beautifying or scarring or cleansing—that is the root of Leigh’s practice. Her very materials enforce this theme, as with the porcelain she uses to cast her plantains, a type used primarily for making dolls. “The porcelain is precolored for making different skin tones,” Leigh explains, “so they have these great names like Oriental and Natural. They’re fun materials that deal with ideas of empire and chinoiserie.” She enjoys the hyperreal appearance they take on in the kilns, toeing the line between the natural and the artificial. Such ideas converge in French Manicure, a cluster of brown forms that Leigh tipped with pink and white glazes. “I love the idea that you could make your body pure again by painting it white and pink. So that it becomes better than natural.” Whether it’s a boot mark, manicures, or tribal scarification, the act of marking the body captures the artist’s attention. She cites as inspiration both Hannah Wilke’s ’70s-era scarification series and Ana Mendieta’s blood-strewn performances about sexual violence. She also looks to Nkisi power objects, which gain strength as nails are driven into them. “There’s a tension in such gestures between whether they’re decorative or they’re abject,” she remarks. “It’s as if there’s some innate need to adorn with scars. But I like to remind viewers what a scar really is—to take the romanticization out of the idea.”

Leigh’s exploration of the trials to which we submit our bodies can perhaps be traced back to the severity of her upbringing. Her father, a fundamentalist Nazarene minister, and the strict Christian environment in which she grew up, has left a lasting effect. As a child, she felt “scarred” by the idea that the body must be purified. “It’s influenced my work in that it’s created my awareness of the possibility of transgression in almost any thought or act.” This interest in transgression might also be applied to Leigh’s embrace of ceramics, which has long been viewed by the contemporary artworld as craft or, worse, women’s work. Although it has lately seen a resurgence, it remains an eccentric track to pursue. “I got a lot of resistance,” as Leigh puts it.

Nevertheless, the medium of ceramics—with its formal tactility and conceptual heft—continues to inspire Leigh. She recounts a scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the hero finds work at a paint factory renowned for its “pure” white paint, created by mixing in 10 drops of black paint. Her white teeth (for Ota Benga) (2004) was inspired by that scene. It made her think about how many different colors of glazes she could get into the white porcelain piece. As she relates this story, I flip through a bound book of photocopied texts and images that she uses as references. I stop at a soft-focus snapshot of a female pit bull, sitting on its haunches on the asphalt. Around its neck is a dangerous looking silver-spiked collar; along its stomach are two rows of swollen teats tipped with pink and white nipples. It’s immediately obvious why Leigh took the photo— the dog eerily resembles her work. Her themes are all there: the fertility, the menace, the ur-urban street aesthetic. Leigh says the image is blurred because her hand was shaking: “It was like one of my sculptures was walking down the street towards me.”