Leo Hajducki – Artist Statement
Due to space constraints, we were unable to include Leo’s full artist statement in the Together | Apart ‘About the Artists’ book. So we are posting it in its entirely here.
Leo Hajducki
‘Tail of Two Cities’ (2025)
Collage
About the Art
Tail of Two Cities examines how cities—and the people who move through them—exist in a constant state of tension between connection and separation. Using an outdated estate map of Edinburgh and a contemporary Glasgow Art Map, the collage brings two civic identities into contact without collapsing their differences. One map is tied to property, ownership and historical authority; the other to cultural mobility, grassroots networks and public access. They sit together yet speak from opposing worldviews. Throughout the collage, political fragments appear: a hand clutching the Financial Times, a red tile proclaiming VIVE LA COMMUNE, youth-culture quotations about class performance, and a line from Barthes on rejecting the moral policing of “good society.” These pieces clash, overlap, and refuse to settle into a single narrative. Instead, they highlight how power, class, and authorship shape our sense of place—and how easily those structures can be unsettled when images and voices are recontextualised. The two cats, one ceramic and one real, anchor the work in a philosophical play between presence and imitation, authenticity and artifice. Their borrowed voices—one from Britpop, one from Barthes—reflect how identity within a city is both performed and contested. They act as witnesses positioned at opposite poles, holding the composition in a state of tension. Ultimately, the work thinks about cities as spaces we co-inhabit but experience unevenly: places where histories run parallel, where revolution and respectability coexist, and where the local is always political. The collage offers no resolution. Instead, it holds Edinburgh and Glasgow—as well as their cultural, economic and ideological contradictions—together, apart.
About the Artist
Leo Hajducki (she/they) is an artist whose practice is rooted in drawing—often done quietly, privately, and with an intensity that allows days to pass unnoticed in the studio. Their early work explored astronomical forms before moving through anatomy, eventually finding a grounding in portraiture, where attention, tenderness, and presence converge. Alongside drawing, Leo works opportunistically across installation, film, collage, painting, photography—anything that invites learning and play becomes part of the work. Leo has just finished an MLitt in Curatorial Practice in Contemporary Art at the Glasgow School of Art, building on an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Edinburgh. Their artistic interests revolve around intimacy, perception, materiality, and the quiet states that making can open up.
– Leo Hajduckie, 2026