LeeAnn Seaburg Perry

The Artist

---

LeeAnn Seaburg Perry has known she would be an artist since age nine — her childhood drawings already full of the shading and dimensionality that betray a three-dimensional thinker. A native of Lakewood, Washington, she followed that instinct through Clover Park High School, Pierce College, and Lewis & Clark College, earning her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in New York in 1980, where she received the prestigious Studio Scholar Award from the Ford Foundation.

Over more than three decades, LeeAnn has carved from studios in Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado — and is now back home in Tumwater, WA. In 1989, a transformative year in Vermont introduced her to the region's remarkable metamorphic stone, and stone has been her chosen medium ever since. She has made personal pilgrimages to the Danby marble quarry — riding down into the dark, dank mine to hand-select the stones she feels contain a human figure. To date, two tons of Vermont Imperial Marble have made the journey to her Tumwater studio, exposed to light for the first time in 600 million years.

Her work is immediately recognizable: a distinctive articulation of the head, the flat plane of the face, and the eloquent tension of an arm or headdress left to complete the narrative. These are not portraits — they are distillations. The stone's own color, mineral veining, and natural surface often seem to conspire with the subject, as if the figure were always there, waiting.

LeeAnn's abstractions of the human form are held in private collections across the United States and in many countries abroad — including the collection of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"Carving stone feels like reading the best mystery book of all time. Each stone is a new enthralling chapter." — LeeAnn Seaburg Perry

Philosophy & Process

---

LeeAnn approaches each piece without a predetermined image. She lets the stone itself be the collaborator — reading its shape, direction, and surface texture before making a single cut. The head emerges first; the body follows in its own time. Parts of the original stone surface are often deliberately preserved alongside the carved form, placing the natural and the sculpted in quiet dialogue.

"Simplification communicates the power of the stone," she says. Her tools are chisels, hammers, rasps, and a small grinding wheel. Six grits of diamond sandpaper, worked underwater, bring the surface to its final luminosity. The result is sculpture that invites the eye — and the hand.

When a sculpture is complete, LeeAnn designs and commissions a custom wood base created specifically for the piece. Most bases include a turntable, allowing you to rotate the sculpture with just a touch of your finger — no need to lift or reposition it by hand. The base and the work are conceived together as a single finished object.

Her materials span the geological spectrum: Vermont Imperial Marble and Yule Colorado Marble, Washington State and Vermont Soapstone, Utah Alabaster, Pacific Northwest Sandstone, and regional Limestone. Each stone carries its own history — light penetrating marble's crystals to give the appearance of warmth, soapstone's softness demanding a slow and meditative hand, alabaster's translucency warming a figure from within.

Education & Teaching

---