Belonging on Earth: June Leaf in Memoriam

In 1970 the artists June Leaf and Robert Frank moved to a small fisherman’s cabin at the end of a dirt road, overlooking the ocean, in the town of Mabou, on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Their neighbors helped build a fence to keep out the sheep, who had been living in the house before they moved in.

When they first moved there from New York City, Mabou was a “foreign land,” Leaf later said². But that feeling changed. It came to feel “like home.” This drawing was made during their early years in the house, before they built Leaf a separate studio building, when she still made her work in the attic room upstairs. She pasted a photograph of the window—exemplifying her view looking out onto the Mabou landscape—in the middle of the paper, and built out the composition of the room around it, the space in which she worked.

“I experienced the feeling of belonging on the land,” Leaf said, reflecting back many years after her move to Mabou, “on the world, on the earth.”