MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
April 22, 2024
This week we recognize Margaret LeJeune, and her decade plus photo-based art practice focused on climate.
The Female Mariners Project, 2013-2018 (above) investigates the lives of women who live and work on the water. Fueled by research into alternative living situations and environmentally conscious housing, this project started as an exploration of live-aboard sailors but has grown into a multidimensional conversation on gendered space, environmental concerns, and cultural tradition. These images of female captains, crew, watermen, and shipwrights challenge gendered maritime tropes such as the doting and passive mermaid and the dangerous siren.
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Dart, 2018 (above) is a collaborative video work created with South African artist Hanien Conradie. This film documents a ritual that involves writing poetry on the surface of a river. Exploring notions of communal and ancestral pain as well as the power of the landscape to transform and heal, this work weaves together drone footage with Afrikaans and English audio recordings. This work was exhibited as part of #IAMWATER, an ecoartspace billboard exhibition in New York City in 2021. Dart was created as part of The Ephemeral River - Global Nomadic Art Project sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Art and The Natural World (CCANW), Science Walden / UNIST, YATOO, and the Korean Cultural Centre UK.
The images in LeJeune's Shifting Halo series, 2019 (above) document how climate change and logging practices are impacting the Boreal Forest. This woodland biome, also known as the Emerald Halo, circles the northern portion of the globe. The photographic works draw attention to the damage caused by clearcutting, including the release of carbon stored in the soil and trees, and the destruction of resident bird habitat. Sound waves of Boreal Chickadee calls punctuate several images in this series to silently echo the depleting number of avian species in this shifting landscape. Shifting Halo was created as part of an artist residency at the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Research Center (UNDERC).
LeJeune's durational work, Thoreau’s Sink, 2022 (above) consists of sixty-six lumen prints arranged in a grid pattern. Made over the course of a week-long artist residency at Trout Lake Research Station, this piece documents the species present at Crystal Bog on unfixed photographic paper. These pastel, ephemeral illustrations of mosses, plants, and trees will fade over time. This time-based work is a quiet plea for the protection, conservation, and restoration of one of our most precious landscapes.
Thirteen Hours to Fall, 2018 - present (below) examines the climate crisis through investigations of contemporary and future littoral zones. This multi-media work includes collage, salted paper prints, video, and sculptural photographic objects. These works ask the viewer to bear witness to the complex history of the mid-Atlantic coast, a landscape dramatically altered by the timber industry, plantation farming practices, and climate change. This interdisciplinary and intersectional project draws from environmental history, geography, and maritime traditions including mapping and way-finding in an effort to define our relationship to this rapidly changing landscape.
Margaret LeJeune is an image-maker, educator, and curator originally from Rochester, New York (USA). She was named the 2023 Woman Science Photographer of the Year by the Royal Photographic Society. Anchored in photography, her creative practice marries art, science, and environmental studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions at The Griffin Museum of Photography (USA), Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (USA), The Center for Fine Art Photography (USA), ARC Gallery (USA), Circe Gallery Cape Town (South Africa), Science Cabin (South Korea), and Umbrella Arts (USA) and is in several collections including the Center for Art+Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. LeJeune has been invited to participate in several residency programs which foster collaboration between the arts and sciences including the Global Nomadic Art Project, University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center, Trout Lake Research Station, Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation - Ives Lake Field Station, and the 2023 Changing Climate Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has been published in numerous publications including Lenscratch, Slate, and Culture, Community, and Climate: conversations and emergent praxis from art.earth press. She is a founding member of the Women's Environmental Photography Collective and the Vice-Chair of the Society of Photographic Education (SPE). www.margaretlejeune.com
