Leanne Bell Gonczarow

Programme:

Art - PhD/MPhil

Start date:

Sep-17

Mode of study:

Part time

Research title:

On reflection: the politics and poetics of light on a warming world. A practice-based investigation in the expanded photography field.

Biography

Leanne is a practice-based PhD candidate based in the School of Art at ECA. 

Leanne’s research investigates how a lens-based contemporary art practice can situate itself critically and imaginatively in relation to the climate crisis. The context for this research is the well-established hypothesis that the rate of global warming is predicted to dramatically increase as the global ice melt accelerates, due to a significant reduction in reflection of the sun’s rays from the surface of white ice.

The practice foregrounds the interplay of light and matter on a variety of scales (personal/universal, local/global, micro/macro), specifically considering how the camera could be utilised not only as a representational tool to document the landscape in crisis, but performatively, to foreground questions of ontology, materiality and agency.

She holds an MA Visual Art (Book Art) from Camberwell College of Art and has presented her practice-based research at festivals, exhibitions and symposiums including London Artist Book Fair at ICA and Central House of Artists, Moscow. In 2018 she was funded by Creative Scotland to participate in the ‘Planetary Processing’ peer forum (organised by Glasgow-based artist and writer Dr Rowan Lear) at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. This evolved into a collective of artists working with photomedia, ecology and embodiment. She is part of the Futurity / Society / Action research cluster at ECA. 

 

Research

  • Philosophies and physics of light
  • Digital photography: ontologies, ecologies and materialities 
  • New materialism and the image apparatus

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