Leila Gerges

My interest in this kind of decorative metalwork started in Melbourne, looking at the gates, verandahs, balustrades on postwar migrant-built houses. Much of it reflecting decorative styles of Mediterranean origin. A trip to Mexico enabled me to follow that interest into a new context — walking through Mexico City, Aguascalientes, Mérida and Guanajuato, I discovered the world of rejas (iron grilles and bars) that felt strikingly familiar in form but rooted in a completely different history.

Mexican architecture is deeply hybrid. Indigenous, Spanish colonial, Moorish-influenced and modern forms sit side by side and these windows, doors and grilles not only guard a threshold but contain rich histories of ornamental tradition and craft. I became fascinated in the way a small set of forms such as a spiral and can get endlessly reconfigured across different buildings and regions, almost algorithmically.

Alongside the ironwork, I collected other surfaces that I am typically drawn to—glass, tilework, painted walls, torn posters — many of these are like found paintings existing in urban space which i gather on my walks.

The rejas interest me because they work on two levels at once: beautiful and controlling in the same gesture, softening a boundary without removing it. My own process ended up mirroring this. I work from photo fragments collected on these walks, and building the collages has an affinity with the ironwork itself as each takes a limited set of elements and recombines them into new patterns and forms. Like the rejas themselves, the acrylic lets light pass through and the works become windows in their own right. The central circle motif is like a portal, lens or mandala also constructed from these fragments but where the window grilles hold a boundary in place the portal offers a way through.

Terra Incognita is a series of abstract paintings developed in response to terrazzo, a material I kept noticing in my everyday built environment from the foyer of the mid-century apartment building I lived in in Toorak to shop floors and verandahs of migrant-era houses in the inner north of Melbourne. Originally developed in Venice in the 15th Century and brought to postwar Australia by Italian craftsmen, terrazzo became part of the material world of the migrant generation who settled Melbourne's inner and western suburbs in the 1950s and 60s. This is the same generation as my mother's family, who arrived in Australia as displaced persons from Eastern Europe after WWII. There's something nostalgic yet whimsical about a material that keeps reinventing itself — one era's ageing  supermarket floor becomes the next era's design trend.

Looking closely at the chips and fragments embedded in terrazzo's surface, I began tracing and abstracting them into layered fields of colour, blowing them up into large interlocking shapes — repeating and reconfiguring them into new compositions that echo the repetitive, almost manufactured logic of terrazzo itself. The shapes mutate as they multiply and become maps of an unknown territory, both familiar and strange.

Viral Movie is a meditative found-footage film composed of scenes from dystopian cinema — including Contagion, The Quiet Earth, Stalker, The Road, Outbreak, 28 Days Later and The Omega Man, among others. Familiar images take on new weight in the shadow of COVID-19 — the fear, dread and disorientation of the pandemic is reflected back through decades of films that had already imagined it.

Viral Movie was made as part of Influence, a collaborative installation with artist Karleng Lim, conceived through dialogue during the pandemic. Structured across three zones — Body, Mind and Soul — the installation weaves together domestic rituals like sourdough baking, the constant news cycle, and a quieter sensory retreat space, exploring the anxieties around health, control and connection that came with lockdown.

No Limit introduces the Hedgewitch- my alter ego, a trickster, wanderer and urban spell-caster. In spirit, if not in practice, she carries something of the old folk witch — wild and untamed, moving through spaces built for order and control. A 21st-century mystic on one long dérive, testing the city's physical and psychic boundaries.

In folklore, hedge witches lived on the edge of villages, working with plants and unseen forces, moving between the cultivated and the wild. This Hedgewitch occupies a similar threshold as she moves through places marked by formal landscaping and architectural dominance. Her head is a plastic topiary sphere, a mass-produced, imperfect version of the real hedges she moves through. There's a small joke buried in it: manicured gardens like these often imitate the order and grandeur of European estates, and her plastic sphere, in turn, imitates them.

She wanders through Venice's labyrinthine alleys and the hedge maze at Villa Pisani, stands among the tetrapods on the Alexandria breakwater, and appears in a Cairo hotel garden with the Pyramids behind her. This was footage filmed during my father's first return to Egypt in over fifty years. Her costume is a type of court jester camouflage and is printed with photographic fragments collected during urban walks.

The installation combines three-channel video, suspended acrylic discs and a large wall collage made from the same imagery as the costume. The video plays across sculptural screens built from shipping container panels, anchored by a maze of tiled blocks and hazard tape.

No Limit
2019
Three-channel video installation
Digital video (8:50 min, looped), acrylic discs, photographic collage, mannequin with custom costume, tiled blocks, shipping container panels and steel, hazard tape
Soundscape by Lola Paulova
First exhibited at VCA Masters Exhibition, Martin Myer Arena, Southbank, Melbourne.

Drift Mobile ( Berlin)

Drift Mobile is a suspended installation of acrylic discs, printed with digital collages made from photo fragments gathered during urban walks in Berlin. Hung as a mobile, the discs slowly rotate and shift — catching light, throwing reflections around the room, revealing and hiding themselves again as you move past them.

Each disc distills a fragment of the wider collage practice into something smaller and more abstract, colour and shape taking over from the original photograph, so the source becomes almost unrecognisable.

Installation view, From Where I Stand, curated by Dr Kim Donaldson, VCA Artspace, Melbourne, 2019.

Genius Loci refers to a place's atmosphere or "spirit of place." This work is a response to Toorak, Melbourne — exploring the associations and atmosphere of a contemporary suburban locale seen through the eyes of an outsider.

Manicured gardens, hedges, high walls and topiary inspire a reflection on class, colonialism, and 17th century European garden design and its values of control over nature. This work playfully appropriates that landscape in a quasi-mystical simulacra.

The spirit of place is personified and sits on a plinth. Some materials were sourced from hard rubbish, and the plastic topiary balls are available at Bunnings.

Photographic series and exhibition at Chamber Presents 2017 Archival pigment prints

Customer Parking Only is a photographic series made across Melbourne, Los Angeles, Berlin, Texas and New Mexico — strip malls, empty lots, defunct signage, sun-scorched facades. Spaces built for commerce and slowly being abandoned by it.

Working with a deadpan eye, the series finds accidental beauty in the unglamorous and the overlooked. The title, borrowed from ubiquitous car park signs, hints at the conditional nature of access to these spaces: you're welcome, but only as a customer.