Please Make It Stop (a survey of sorts)

Please Make It Stop

a survey of sorts 

Leon van de Graaff

24 - 26 October 2025

Pea Green Boat Artists Studios and Gallery

31 Tinning St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia

An introduction of sorts.

Please Make It Stop is a survey of sorts, covering 4 decades of Leon’s art journey, mostly focusing on the 17 years since moving to Melbourne.

Leon’s earliest memory of making art, is his first conceptual artwork; found cigarette butts in a found beer bottle, all collected at a Sydney beach at the age of around six or seven. It was intended as a demonstration and protest against the amount of rubbish on the beach. Of course his parents said that was disgusting, threw it in a bin and made him wash his hands. 

Nearly 50 years later, little has changed. He is still collecting rubbish and making statements or observations about the society that has produced it. The level of transformation as well as the breadth and complexity of the commentary have increased but waste remains his core material. 

The works in Please Make It Stop range in age from the artist’s high school era in the 1980s (though, importantly, not produced for high school) mockingly presented in a museum case, to work produced this year. The journey from then to now takes us through a wide variety of media and styles from graphic art and photography for friends’ bands, through sound art, video, costume and jewelry, but consistently returns to found-object sculpture as the primary form.

The artworks in this exhibition were created on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal, Turrbal and Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people.

The above text is from a book of this exhibition which is currently in production. The next post will be announcing the details of the book, which will be available on this website.