Leo Marmol
Photo: Roger Davies

Leo Marmol celebrates craft as the practice of living deliberately in a culture defined by immediacy. As technology increasingly mediates how we live and relate to one another, and instability becomes part of everyday life, he approaches making as a form of play, an ongoing process rather than a fixed outcome. Drawing on decades of work at Marmol Radziner alongside his parallel practice as a painter, Marmol contends that art, architecture, and construction are not separate disciplines, but expressions of a single creative impulse.

Invoking the Bauhaus belief in thinking through making and the myth of Sisyphus as articulated by Albert Camus, Marmol reflects on the human desire for clarity in a world that resists resolution. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill, we continue the work knowing it will never be finished. No single artwork or building can resolve this condition, but that failure does not diminish their value. Instead, Marmol frames creative practice as an ongoing commitment: a willingness to begin again, and to build meaning amid endless cycles of return. As systems of production grow more seamless and abstract, Work in Progress: The Practice of Return reasserts the value of the imperfect, human act of making.