ASU graduate student Aimee Leon poses for a portrait at Step Gallery. Aimee Leon is currently fighting cancer and pursuing two degrees. (Photo by Ryan Liu)
While ASU graduate student Aimee León fights the fatigue and pain that come with lymphoma, she’s also getting two graduate degrees and expressing her passion for sheep shearing by creating a powerful art project.
Last February, León found a troubling mass in her armpit when she was observing and volunteering in sheep-dependent communities in British Columbia. As soon as she got back to the U.S., she was tested and diagnosed with lymphoma.
“It’s really put a crimp on what I want to do,” she said. “Preparing for my research is very difficult when I’m not able to travel. Nothing is set in stone. I know where I’m going to go next, I don’t know when.”
Battle with cancer
Lymphoma is a type of blood cell cancer that develops in many parts of the body, including in lymph nodes like in León’s case. It brings a person a lot of fatigue, fever, weight loss and sweating.
León had a surgery in April to remove the lymphoma, but in August, one day after her birthday, she found another mass in her armpit and the scan revealed she had six more in her chest.
Despite the illness, León will graduate with her MFA — one of the two master’s degrees she is working on, this December. Leon jokes that she does it because tends to overdo things and wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
“I’m very analytical; I can’t just be in my studio making art,” she said. “My brain functions equally on the both sides, I think. So, I was taking a lot of these extra classes to fulfill that need for analytical learning and to support a lot of the research that I was doing for my art.”
León met ASU professor of art history Betsy Fahlman when she took her course about women in the visual arts.
Fahlman said León has been one of the most remarkable students in her career, being able to demonstrate a unique ability to move easily between academic and studio work.
(Photo Courtesy of Aimee León)
Although León has a lot on her plate, Fahlman said grit, drive, strength and determination have been the most important qualities that helped León achieve her goals.
“Through thick and thin she just kept going,” she said.
Family, friends and ASU faculty have been very supportive of León fighting her illness. She created a blog to keep friends from all over the world updated with the progress of overcoming the disease and to share experiences with others fighting lymphoma.
However, some people have disappeared from her life because everyone deals with things differently, she said.
“People have their own battles and they don’t always know how to deal with people who have some kind of thing going on with mortality in a way, so some people do distance themselves," she said. "I think it’s natural.”
In addition to being patient with people’s reaction "to the news,” it’s important to get a second opinion about your disease and ask for support, León said. Cancer is so intimidating, because it’s very little known and at the same time very wide-spread, she said.
“We all react differently,” she said. “But I think if you’re able to talk about it the more support you’re going to get and it’s surprising where it comes from.”
Colorful tattoos of flowers, birds, bees and meaningful phrases cover León’s arms, leaving the right shoulder plain.
The spot is reserved for a sheep, León said.
“Now that I’m sick I can’t get a tattoo, so I have to wait until I’m not sick anymore,” she said. “It’s definitely going to be an homage to the sheep, celebrating them in some way, somehow.”
ASU graduate student Aimee Leon's sheep shearing works will be on display Grant Street Studios located at Phoenix. (Photo by Ryan Liu)
{Re}collecting the herdbeast
In ASU's Step Gallery, located on the corner of Grant and 7th street in downtown Phoenix, León exhibited her art project called {Re}collecting the herdbeast. The exhibition is a part of her MFA thesis project that brings together León’s passion and years of research.
Several dozen sheep fleeces ranging in color from dark gray to cream white are laid out in the first room, spacious and light. As gallery visitors step in, the mounts of wool look as if they might come to life, get up and start bleating, upset that they’ve been disturbed.
Each of those fleeces would be enough to make at least one sweater, eight scarves or a lot of socks. However, people prefer synthetic materials to wool, and there’s no cost benefit to the owners who want to send the wool to the mill, León said.
“We don’t have commercial mills in the U.S. anymore,” León said. “So it costs a lot of money to get it processed into something usable.”
León brought all those fleeces from places in the U.S. as well as from isolated parts of the world, including the Faroe Islands and the Shetland Islands, where she was collecting data for her research and volunteering.
León created the exhibition to create a new awareness of the wool usage, she said. It’s an educational project to make sure sheep fleece stays in the commodity cycle.
“The intention is to take all of this discarded wool and put it back in the cycle,” she said.
A long rectangular rug stretches on the floor of the second room. It’s almost finished, but there are still a few gaps to fill by León and people who come to the exhibition and learn to weave. After the master class, some of the visitors buy the wool to perfect their newly acquired skill at home.
(Photo Courtesy of Aimee León)
A gray, curly and soft rug that sits on a bench was made by León at a lake in Sweden. The rug is very special in that it took about seven hours of non-stop felting to complete, León said.
A wall in the room showcases 27 samples of wool yarn, gradually fading from the darkest black to the lightest samples. The samples arrived from various parts of the world in quantities as large as five pounds as a response to León’s handspun yarn call.
With this project, León also aims to create a community around people who are involved with sheep from around the world, she said.
“There’re small groups of people that still utilize the wool and see the importance of it,” she said. ”For me, it’s about bringing these people together and having them understand that they are valued and they are an important part of society.”
Two videos on the walls opposite each other run non-stop, filling the room with the sounds of bleating. The one on the left shows the shearers from around the world at work, while the one on the right, filmed by the GoPro camera installed in the flock, shows the world from the animal’s perspective.
These videos demonstrate that human and sheep are mutually significant, León said.
“Neither is more important than the other,” she said. “The sheep depend on humans to function. The sheep cannot function without human beings. We created an animal to be what it is today, to be sheared, and they require us. And in turn, we require them, so it’s a cycle between the two.”
English professor Ronald Broglio is not only on the committee for Leon’s MFA project but has helped León by discussing many animal-related ideas, he said.
Broglio said the exhibition is very powerful and the main part of it is that León brings forward the history of production that was forgotten as a result of decline in demand for wool.
“She makes it visible and visceral and palpable in a way,” he said. “When you hold these materials or see people interact with them, it has the whole dimensionality to it.”
(Photo Courtesy of Aimee León)
Sheep flock together
León was born and raised around sheep but never had to deal with them as a kid.
When she grew up, she attended one of few shearing schools in the U.S for one week. It didn’t take her long to become a certified sheep shearer, because by the time she’d entered the school, she already knew how to do it, she said.
“The school tightened up my skills a little bit,” she said.
With the help of the Nathan Cummings Foundation that granted León the travel award, she traveled to some of the most secluded places on the planet, including the Shetland Islands and the Faroe Islands, as well as British Columbia, Sweden and Norway to explore small farms and how they function in the wool cycle.
“I volunteer myself as labor basically, and I embed myself in the farm and work for them and learn how they sustain themselves, what happens to their wool and what that means for them,” she said.
For León, shearing is a bonding experience with the animal she loves. She tries to be kind to the creatures and learn about every animal, she said.
“Sheep are very charismatic little creatures,” she said. “They are very fun and each one has a very distinct personality. Some of them, I have to say, I’m not the biggest fan of, just like humans, but most of them are very very sweet and fun to work with. I love them.”
Although sheep are often viewed in the negative light as followers by nature, they are very bright and have their own distinctive voice that helps them detect each other in a flock of 5,000 sheep, León said.
Sheep also have a very good memory, which allows them to recognize people after five years of not seeing them. León’s favorite sheep Shiva, who gets a haircut each year, never fails to recognize her.
“They can be doing sheep things in the middle of nowhere for two or three years but find their way home,” she said. “I believe that if you watch the sheep and listen to the sheep you will know what they need. And you can only tell a sheep what to do so much.”
Shearing sheep every year in the period between February and June, León knows from her own experience that sheep are not only independent, but also might protest shearing by kicking, she said.
Although León didn’t have any serious accidents while shearing, she’s had a lot of kicking and dragging to deal with, she said.
“The human gets injured a lot more than the animal during shearing,” she said. “I’m black and blue all shearing season. You get kicked, you get knocked over, you get the animal wiggle out and jump and drag you around. Trying to catch them can be quite entertaining.”
Although nobody wants to be mean or abusive to the animals on purpose because an animal is a commodity, accidents do happen, she said.
“It’s very difficult to be a shearer,” she said. “They say that you’re not a full-blown shearer until you have a sheep die on you. I didn’t."
Reach the reporter at kmaryaso@asu.edu or follow on Twitter @KseniaMaryasova
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