About the Artist

Abrina Leonhard

I grew up in rural Wisconsin, where hunting was not a sport. It was how a family ate. What I was taught alongside it mattered more than the hunting itself: you use every part of what you take, you are grateful for it, and you owe something back to the ground it came from.

My grandfather believed that protecting the land was a responsibility we inherit, not a hobby we choose. He said it plainly and he meant it as an instruction. I've carried it since.

I don't hunt anymore. But the way I was taught to think about animals — as owed something, rather than owned — is the whole reason this work exists.

The work

Each piece begins with an ethically sourced skull and ends with somewhere between seven and ten thousand rhinestones, placed one at a time, by hand. A single work takes over a hundred hours. The stones cover every surface — front, back, sides, and the base, including the parts no one will see. That completeness is not a technical flourish. It is the point.

The colours are not decorative choices. Each palette comes from the animal's own life: where it lives, when it moves, what the light is doing at the hour it's awake. A mule deer gets the clear vertical lines of rock. A white-tailed buck gets cobalt at the eyes.

Crystal on bone is a contradiction, and I want it to be. The first reaction is usually unease. What comes after it — and it does come — is the recognition that these animals were always worth looking at this closely.

Every piece is one of one. None will be repeated.

Get in touch

I'd rather talk than not. If you're considering a piece, working on a room, or wondering whether something can be made at a different scale or in a different colour, call me.

Abrina Leonhard
715-612-1452
abrina48@gmail.com