About
BPhoto (Griff.) GCertMuseumSt (Deakin) DipPhoto (SBIT) CertIIIArts (BIT)
LeAnne Vincent is an Australian photo-based environmental artist originally from the Nambucca Valley on Gumbaynggirr country, New South Wales. She was raised on land at the base of Mount Yarrahapinni where she developed a love for nature and connection to the bush, waterways, and the ocean. Since then, she's resided in Queensland on Yuggera country for several years and practices art in her Ipswich studio and surrounds.
Her photography practice began with black and white film and working in the darkroom and has developed into a much broader practice including digital photography, photograms, cyanotype printing, and experimentation with pinhole, Lomography, video, and drones. In the last five years her practice has evolved, finding new ways to make images and express environmental concerns using textiles, threads, and new and pre-used fabrics and papers.
Her practice is engaged with the landscape and relies on exploration of Anthropogenic biomes to investigate human behaviour and connection to place, collective memories, and natural heritage. Natural and urban environments provide unlimited stimuli, and her work is often informed by upheaval in these environments, destruction from the forces of nature or human interaction and habitation.
As her practice is process driven, walking, exploring, observing, and collecting objects are vital to informing her work. She regularly hikes in her local area, and further afield, to collect remnants of flora and fauna and discarded human-made objects on the ground. She developed her visual language using circles, multiples, and layering, and uses stitched forms on cyanotype collages to represent mapping, trails, and movement through landscapes by humans and wildlife. Together with flora and fauna she uses engineered objects in her work, like saw blades and plastic bottles, that represent human development and consumption.
She holds a Bachelor of Photography from Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, where she studied art theory and majored in photographic art practice. She has exhibited for the past 18 years in solo and group exhibitions and has achieved several awards. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and is held in public and private collections.
Artist profile by Louise Martin-Chew
Leanne Vincent’s art practice is immersed in the landscape, from which she creates collaged, stitched and sewn cyanotypes to capture an environmental experience. Her most recent project in Queensland’s Toowoomba stimulated an exploration of anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), caused when human activity alters regional ecosystems. These works unite elements of known city buildings with flora and fauna, framing the ‘Garden City’ with vignettes, familiar and unfamiliar, and have taken Vincent into new conceptual territory.
There is a sense that Leanne Vincent’s practice, ambition and scope is expanding like one of her constructed cyanotypes, in which circular pieces of printed fabric are layered over one another, their collective form creating another broadly circular shape, amplifying the imagery, motifs and stitching that holds them together.
Vincent says that winning the Flying Arts Alliance ‘Art for Life’/ Spotlight Award in 2020 ‘changed everything that I do’.[1] This success became a catalyst for new work and opened her practice to increased opportunities. The fact that her winning work, Flourish (2020), was in a medium new to her practice was encouraging, and further embedded her interest in pushing the boundaries of cyanotype, to see how far this medium could take her. She is not alone, with many artists in recent years working with cyanotype, both on paper and fabric, but in Vincent’s hands the printed cyanotypes are a starting point, combined with photography, with subsequent assembly and stitching processes (tracing her own walking trails through an area) drawing them together in an almost sculptural way.
These works convey a narrative that starts in the natural world but has recently accommodated buildings and other elements from the built environment. It is work that she describes as ‘activist’: ‘They become works that can pose questions, always about the environment. I want people to understand the human impact on the environment – and reduce it.’
Vincent’s initial training as a photographer has fine-tuned her attention to the cyanotype process. A relatively simple method, cyanotypes allow for sunlight and shadow to capture the image. Her process also uses digital photographs converted to negatives, then printed on transparency film to create cyanotype prints. Found objects from her own environment, and those collected during residences in other places are integral. The recent (2021) Toowoomba-based commission ignited her interest in the convergences between the urban and natural worlds, constructed as:
Anthromes of the Toowoomba region, reinforcing our connection with nature by highlighting natural elements used in urban structures such as Victorian architecture that often uses nature motifs as decorative elements. Garden City celebrates natural environments in urban areas, while reminding us of our impact on often unseen ecosystems existing around us.
In Garden City II the central shape within the circular collection is the Alexandra building in the central business district. Other Toowoomba landmark buildings include the Masonic Hall, Empire Theatre, White Horse and Norville Hotels. However these built structures are largely overwritten by dominant natural details, tendril-like organic lines, vignettes of trees and ferns. Uniting all these elements are subtle mauve and yellow stitched circular lines (which adopt the Toowoomba city floral emblems, Sweet Violet and Wattle) that radiate from the centre, reaching outward with an explorative line, noting the ‘coevolution’ of environments, manmade and natural, that define the anthrome which increasingly impacts the majority of the terrestrial and aquatic biomes on earth.
In these works, the ecological changes with which humanity has impacted the globe are mapped locally. Vincent writes, ‘Ultimately, Garden City aims to celebrate natural environments in urban areas, while reminding us of our impact on often unseen ecosystems existing around us.’ It is an interest she plans to pursue, with new work under development incorporating discarded human detritus from her environment – cyanotypes using discarded items collected from the ground (plastic bread tags, old USB drives, fishing line, soft drink can tabs, fishing lures), within urban and natural textures.
In subsequent works inspired by day trips in Queensland during pandemic restrictions, Contact Tracing assembles circular shapes into a broad rectangle. Images layered over each other invite the viewer along a path leading to a lake, and into a tree with an intriguingly extensive root system. These forms are ghostly in their reversal into the negative, and ‘human’ interventions are indicated with keys, bar codes, and maps crowded together with vignettes of vegetation, feathers and watery reflections. This environmental map captures constructions of humanity on the same plane as objects from nature, illustrating the irrevocable convergence of our present and future. Vincent’s individual path through these places as she made this work is indicated with the stitched line. Bleached and toned cyanotypes add to the variety, suggesting the colours found within the natural landscape.
In Vincent’s recent work, the circular nature of our days, seasons and vegetation is captured in the cyanotype processes, together with humanity’s reshaping of natural ecologies over millennia. These vignettes crystallise difficult realities in a poignantly poetic aesthetic.
Louise Martin-Chew
1 December 2021
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from conversations between the artist and the author, November 2021. N
BPhoto (Griff.) GCertMuseumSt (Deakin) DipPhoto (SBIT) CertIIIArts (BIT)
LeAnne Vincent is an Australian photo-based environmental artist originally from the Nambucca Valley on Gumbaynggirr country, New South Wales. She was raised on land at the base of Mount Yarrahapinni where she developed a love for nature and connection to the bush, waterways, and the ocean. Since then, she's resided in Queensland on Yuggera country for several years and practices art in her Ipswich studio and surrounds.
Her photography practice began with black and white film and working in the darkroom and has developed into a much broader practice including digital photography, photograms, cyanotype printing, and experimentation with pinhole, Lomography, video, and drones. In the last five years her practice has evolved, finding new ways to make images and express environmental concerns using textiles, threads, and new and pre-used fabrics and papers.
Her practice is engaged with the landscape and relies on exploration of Anthropogenic biomes to investigate human behaviour and connection to place, collective memories, and natural heritage. Natural and urban environments provide unlimited stimuli, and her work is often informed by upheaval in these environments, destruction from the forces of nature or human interaction and habitation.
As her practice is process driven, walking, exploring, observing, and collecting objects are vital to informing her work. She regularly hikes in her local area, and further afield, to collect remnants of flora and fauna and discarded human-made objects on the ground. She developed her visual language using circles, multiples, and layering, and uses stitched forms on cyanotype collages to represent mapping, trails, and movement through landscapes by humans and wildlife. Together with flora and fauna she uses engineered objects in her work, like saw blades and plastic bottles, that represent human development and consumption.
She holds a Bachelor of Photography from Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, where she studied art theory and majored in photographic art practice. She has exhibited for the past 18 years in solo and group exhibitions and has achieved several awards. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and is held in public and private collections.
Artist profile by Louise Martin-Chew
Leanne Vincent’s art practice is immersed in the landscape, from which she creates collaged, stitched and sewn cyanotypes to capture an environmental experience. Her most recent project in Queensland’s Toowoomba stimulated an exploration of anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), caused when human activity alters regional ecosystems. These works unite elements of known city buildings with flora and fauna, framing the ‘Garden City’ with vignettes, familiar and unfamiliar, and have taken Vincent into new conceptual territory.
There is a sense that Leanne Vincent’s practice, ambition and scope is expanding like one of her constructed cyanotypes, in which circular pieces of printed fabric are layered over one another, their collective form creating another broadly circular shape, amplifying the imagery, motifs and stitching that holds them together.
Vincent says that winning the Flying Arts Alliance ‘Art for Life’/ Spotlight Award in 2020 ‘changed everything that I do’.[1] This success became a catalyst for new work and opened her practice to increased opportunities. The fact that her winning work, Flourish (2020), was in a medium new to her practice was encouraging, and further embedded her interest in pushing the boundaries of cyanotype, to see how far this medium could take her. She is not alone, with many artists in recent years working with cyanotype, both on paper and fabric, but in Vincent’s hands the printed cyanotypes are a starting point, combined with photography, with subsequent assembly and stitching processes (tracing her own walking trails through an area) drawing them together in an almost sculptural way.
These works convey a narrative that starts in the natural world but has recently accommodated buildings and other elements from the built environment. It is work that she describes as ‘activist’: ‘They become works that can pose questions, always about the environment. I want people to understand the human impact on the environment – and reduce it.’
Vincent’s initial training as a photographer has fine-tuned her attention to the cyanotype process. A relatively simple method, cyanotypes allow for sunlight and shadow to capture the image. Her process also uses digital photographs converted to negatives, then printed on transparency film to create cyanotype prints. Found objects from her own environment, and those collected during residences in other places are integral. The recent (2021) Toowoomba-based commission ignited her interest in the convergences between the urban and natural worlds, constructed as:
Anthromes of the Toowoomba region, reinforcing our connection with nature by highlighting natural elements used in urban structures such as Victorian architecture that often uses nature motifs as decorative elements. Garden City celebrates natural environments in urban areas, while reminding us of our impact on often unseen ecosystems existing around us.
In Garden City II the central shape within the circular collection is the Alexandra building in the central business district. Other Toowoomba landmark buildings include the Masonic Hall, Empire Theatre, White Horse and Norville Hotels. However these built structures are largely overwritten by dominant natural details, tendril-like organic lines, vignettes of trees and ferns. Uniting all these elements are subtle mauve and yellow stitched circular lines (which adopt the Toowoomba city floral emblems, Sweet Violet and Wattle) that radiate from the centre, reaching outward with an explorative line, noting the ‘coevolution’ of environments, manmade and natural, that define the anthrome which increasingly impacts the majority of the terrestrial and aquatic biomes on earth.
In these works, the ecological changes with which humanity has impacted the globe are mapped locally. Vincent writes, ‘Ultimately, Garden City aims to celebrate natural environments in urban areas, while reminding us of our impact on often unseen ecosystems existing around us.’ It is an interest she plans to pursue, with new work under development incorporating discarded human detritus from her environment – cyanotypes using discarded items collected from the ground (plastic bread tags, old USB drives, fishing line, soft drink can tabs, fishing lures), within urban and natural textures.
In subsequent works inspired by day trips in Queensland during pandemic restrictions, Contact Tracing assembles circular shapes into a broad rectangle. Images layered over each other invite the viewer along a path leading to a lake, and into a tree with an intriguingly extensive root system. These forms are ghostly in their reversal into the negative, and ‘human’ interventions are indicated with keys, bar codes, and maps crowded together with vignettes of vegetation, feathers and watery reflections. This environmental map captures constructions of humanity on the same plane as objects from nature, illustrating the irrevocable convergence of our present and future. Vincent’s individual path through these places as she made this work is indicated with the stitched line. Bleached and toned cyanotypes add to the variety, suggesting the colours found within the natural landscape.
In Vincent’s recent work, the circular nature of our days, seasons and vegetation is captured in the cyanotype processes, together with humanity’s reshaping of natural ecologies over millennia. These vignettes crystallise difficult realities in a poignantly poetic aesthetic.
Louise Martin-Chew
1 December 2021
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from conversations between the artist and the author, November 2021. N
