MEDIATING: FROM METAPHOR TO METHOD

Authors

  • Leanne Gonczarow Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37522/pby68y16

Keywords:

Photo-technology, photography, representation, tabular iceberg, Imaginative Processes, Unseen Realities, new-materialisms

Abstract

In her essay, Leanne Gonczarow considers her own artistic practice with photography as focused on specific time-bound fragments of the mass image, akin to pieces of ice detached from a glacier. Moving between metaphor and visual fact, she recounts returning again and again to an image shared by NASA—a rectangular zone of reflection and transcendence.

Author Biography

  • Leanne Gonczarow

    Leanne Bell Gonczarow is a PhD Art Practice researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (final year, part-time) whose practice-research is situated in the expanded field of photography. The elemental stuff of photography – light – is subject and material in her work. She utilises hybrid forms (sculptural installation, video, writing and photography itself) to interrogate photographic ontologies, materialities, agencies and presentations.Gonczarow’s research investigates how a photographic contemporary art practice can respond critically and imaginatively to the climate crisis, specifically to the global ice melt. It considers how the camera can be utilised, not only in its dominant mode as a representational tool to document the landscape in crisis, but performatively—to foreground questions of ontology, materiality and agency. Her research methodology draws on two main theories that in their formation are related to the optical— Karen Barad’s writing on diffraction (Barad 2007) and Howard Caygill’s concept of synechia (Caygill 2021)— to construct a methodology she describes as techno-material-imaginative. Born in County Durham, UK in 1978, Leanne has previously lived and worked in Newcastle, Manchester and London, UK and in Moscow, Russia, where she spent three years teaching at the British Higher School of Art and Design. She holds an MA in Visual Arts: Book Arts (Distinction) from Camberwell College of Arts (2007) and has exhibited her work in exhibitions, fairs and screenings across the UK and internationally including: Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia; Central Booking, New York, USA; Quad, Derby, UK; Occupy My Time Gallery, London UK and ‘London Artists Book Fair’, ICA.

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Published

2025-02-21

Issue

No. 1 (2025): Edge of the Glacier

Section

Articles