> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.catapult-platform.art/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Leah Dixon Gives the Wheel a Different Inventor - URL: https://www.catapult-platform.art/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvesse/ - Published: 2026-08-27T02:54:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T02:54:49.000Z - Description: Leah Dixon with Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel in Espinavessa, curated and text by Sira Pizà, on view through September 12, 2026. - Author: Catapult Submissions Team - Tags: Exhibition, Myth & Folklore, Material & Sculpture, Sculpture & Installation ## Leah Dixon at Spiritvessel Presents Tartan Tartana in Espinavessa [**Spiritvessel**](https://www.spiritvesselespinavessa.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) presents *Tartan Tartana* by [**Leah Dixon,**](http://www.leahdixonart.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) curated by [**Sira Pizà**](https://www.instagram.com/sira%5Fpiza/?ref=catapult-platform.art), through September 12, 2026. **Tartan Tartana** **Artist:** Leah Dixon **Exhibition:** Tartan Tartana **Venue:** [ Spiritvessel ](https://www.spiritvesselespinavessa.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) **City:** Espinavessa, Girona, Spain **Dates:** June 6, 2026 – September 12, 2026 **Address:** Carrer de la Font 7, 17747 Espinavessa, Girona, Spain **Curator:** Sira Pizà **Photography:** Roberto Ruiz **Image Courtesy:** Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel ## **Curatorial View by Sira Pizà** The show's title sculpture, TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, is built around molded sawdust and resin clay onions, the vegetable Dixon assigns to a prehistoric woman who invents the wheel in a five-page origin story the artist wrote years before the exhibition. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Steel columns joined by a yellow wood beam beneath a woven wicker wheel.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-01-1.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, installation view, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Marbled steel blocks and mirrored legs support a yellow crossbeam and woven wheel.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-02.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, installation view, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. In that story, the same woman later watches humanity turn her parents' teeth and bones, the only parts of them that do not disintegrate, into the first monumental architecture. Outdoors, a second sculpture, Megalithic Fireworks Portals, suspends aluminum pipe and a plastic bucket from a freestanding wood and enamel structure. Below, curator Sira Pizà explains why. In a five page long story first written a few years ago, a girl from an undefined period in pre-historical times narrates her life in her home, a boggy glen surrounded by onion grass, which she learns to pick and replant in her family's land, in what seems like the beginning of farming. Her voice is contemporary, and she describes a trajectory of millennia from the vantage point of someone who's already been to all the different moments in time, past, present and future. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Gravel path through a garden leading toward the stone gallery entrance.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-03.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** Tartan Tartana (installation view), Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. The heavy onion smell that always surrounds her becomes a saving grace when she manages to avoid marriage and is free to dedicate her time to mind wandering, investigating, and inventing. As a result of a chain of philosophical considerations, she happens upon the realization that a disc turned on its side, joined to another disc by a stick in its geometrical center, is a wheeled vehicle. She soon connects the device to a rectangular body that can carry things and people far and wide, and so trade begins and with it the exponential spread and mix of human DNA and cultural practices. When her parents die, however, she observes the dawn of the very opposite thing: the fixed, immobile, unperishable power of monumental architecture. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Woven rattan wheel mounted on a steel column beside dried grass in a resin vessel.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-01.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, detail view, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. Her parents' teeth, which were the very thing that killed them, just like their bones, don't seem to disintegrate, and never disappear. She will then go on to see how humans turn to the endeavor of finding a toothbone-like material in their surroundings, which they can extract, move with their now long implemented wheelcarts, carve and cut and build into marble statues, columns, towers, temples, empires. The story re-writes the widely accepted assumption that the wheel as we know it was invented primarily by men, for warfare, instead placing a woman and the universe of immediate domestic survival at the center of human need and desire. It rejects a linear succession of events, understanding evolution and progress as an interconnected grid, rather than a linear road. Like time, in continuous forward motion, the wheel only moves forward, the inventor speaks, because nothing ever goes in any other direction than that. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Close-up of a yellow wood beam bolted into blue marbled enamel steel blocks.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-02-1.webp) ****Leah Dixon**, TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. Acceleration, as Virilio argued, is the true motive of progress - not capital, not accumulation, but the power to erase distances which eventually would lead to globalization. In "Speeding up. Prehistoric animal traction and the revolute joint", Eva Rosenstock suggests viewing the advent of the first vehicles, long before the industrial revolution, from the angle of awareness of time in space and, hence, speed, considering the revolute joint, — the mechanical principle that allows an axle and wheel to rotate relative to one another — as the innovation emerging around the late 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE that dramatically increased the speed and efficiency of animal traction, transforming prehistoric economies and mobility, and thus, human self perception. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Mirrored steel legs and a pale resin onion form resting on a concrete floor.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-03.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. Leah Dixon wrote and has used this story as an internal thread, a sort of origin myth, a root to the sculptural development of her latest projects. When Dixon first came to Espinavessa, it became clear that this place in the world was the perfect setting for her story, a context of stone houses made through centuries upon centuries, fields full of hayball wheels and modern manifestations of untraceable origins everywhere - in the clothes, in the traditions, in the architecture. In Spanish and Catalan, Tartana is an ancient two-wheeled, horse pulled carriage; in modern colloquial language, it refers to an old, decrepit and battered car. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. A visitor walks past the steel and yellow wood sculpture in a sunlit gallery.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-04.webp) ****Leah Dixon**, TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, installation view, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Two dried grass blades rise from small resin onion vessels against a bare wall.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-07.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. Acceleration takes the form of time leaps in Leah Dixon's story, as it does in her sculpture. The past and the future are interwoven in a three-dimensional unfolding of a black, blue and yellow tartan in space. In the plain of the future, we encounter the tower, a rising monument, the epitome of capitalism - the skyscraper, made of reflecting glass, where we can see further away, beyond us: planets, galaxies, outer space. As a high rise building, architecture is no longer made to a person's scale: Dixon's futuristic sculptures might as well be made by another, alien entity. In the reflected galaxies we find our projections, the stories that civilizations have placed in the skies in order to explain themselves. The vertical monument, the tower, is undone, broken into pieces and fallen. Horizontally, it depicts a volumetric take on the principle of warp and weft. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. A dried grass blade rises from a small pale onion-shaped vessel on a steel plinth.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-04.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** TARTAN TARTANA: The Girl Who Invented The Wheel IV, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. The idea of modern urbanism is already found in the very first handmade basket and cloth weavings, something that doesn't exist in nature on its own: the grid. The earliest surviving sample of tartan fabric was found on European-featured mummies in a cemetery in the Tarim Basin desert, in present day China, and it dates back to around 1200 B.C. It's made of kemp, the coarse outer hair of a sheep or goat, and it is so similar to Scottish tartan of the 17th century, that it contributed to the genetics debate around the possibility of Western European migrations in that time period. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-06.webp) ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Suspended discs and vertical panels hang under a pergola against a stone wall.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-installation-05.webp) ****Leah Dixon**, Megalithic Fireworks Portals, installation view, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. Ultimately, evidence has established that highly sophisticated weaving technology had spread across Eurasia long before the Silk Road. After all, looms were invented in the Neolithic period, arguably becoming the first machines in human history, as they mechanized production processes. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Close-up of a large sawdust and resin disc with sky visible through its center.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-05.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** Megalithic Fireworks Portals, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. In terms of abstract thought, looms might mark the beginning of acceleration, speeding up the process of grid-making and materializing the warp and weft into perpendicular spokes holding up the tension between the hub, where the axle sits, and the rim. A tartan, a grid, a basket, a wheel, a circle, a sun: spinning over the fields, over the city landscape in endless circular motion. ***Sira Pizà*** --- What remains after Pizà’s text is the strange ease with which Dixon lets one invention become another. An onion becomes a wheel, the wheel becomes movement, movement becomes architecture, and architecture eventually breaks apart again. ![Exhibition review of Leah Dixon: Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026. Close-up of a vertical enamel panel marbled in red and white.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2026/08/leah-dixon-tartan-tartana-spiritvessel-espinavessa-2026-detail-06.webp) ****Leah Dixon,** Megalithic Fireworks Portals, detail, Spiritvessel, Espinavessa, 2026\. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artist and Spiritvessel. *Tartan Tartana* does not try to correct history so much as loosen its grip, making room for another possible beginning and, with it, another way of imagining where we might be going. --- ### **stay connected, keep the art in motion** [**Leah Dixon on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/leahelizabethdixon/?ref=catapult-platform.art) [**Spiritvessel on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/spiritvesselespinavessa/?ref=catapult-platform.art) [**Sira Pizà on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/sira%5Fpiza/?ref=catapult-platform.art) **About the Artist** **Leah Dixon** Leah Dixon is a sculptor based in New York City whose work investigates the relationship between bodies and architecture in shared social spaces, using a self-made language of modular geometry and personal color science. She holds a BFA from Ohio State University and an MFA from the NYC School of Visual Arts, and is the founder and creative director of BEVERLY'S, a bar and social architecture project in Lower Manhattan. [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/leahelizabethdixon/?ref=catapult-platform.art) **About the Location** **Spiritvessel, Espinavessa** Spiritvessel is an exhibition space in Espinavessa, a village in Girona, Catalonia, curated by Sira Pizà, that has presented solo shows including Xavier Martin Llavaneras, Adam Stamp and Victor Jaenada. [Website](https://www.spiritvesselespinavessa.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) · [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/spiritvesselespinavessa/?ref=catapult-platform.art) **About the Curator** **Sira Pizà** Sira Pizà curated Tartan Tartana at Spiritvessel and has curated previous exhibitions at the space. [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/sira%5Fpiza/?ref=catapult-platform.art) **About Catapult Contemporary - Art Platform Submission** This is an exhibition review published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond. [catapult-platform.art](https://www.catapult-platform.art/) · [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/catapultcontemporary/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Want to be featured? [Submit your work →](https://www.catapult-platform.art/submit/) [Artist in Focus](https://www.catapult-platform.art/artist-in-focus/) ## Julia Zöhrer: Textile Images Between Myth and Presence [Read More](https://www.catapult-platform.art/julia-zohrer-textile-images-between-myth-and-presence) [Exhibition](https://www.catapult-platform.art/exhibition/) ## Richard Serra and the Majesty of Steel Sculptures at Guggenheim Bilbao [Read More](https://www.catapult-platform.art/richard-serra-sculpture) [Interview](https://www.catapult-platform.art/interview/) ## Hugo Brazão: Sculpting Escapism in a World of Fabric, Fiction, and Form [Read More](https://www.catapult-platform.art/hugo-brazao-artist)