For anyone who visited the most recent Lotte Inch exhibition, Across the North Sea, the work of locally-based photographer Anna Lilleengen may well have been a revelation and certainly a joy. Since her images graced the walls of Janette Ray’s Rare Books shop, Lilleengen has been busy. I met with her to chat about her practice and her Vantage Art Prize success back in June.
RH: I wanted to begin by congratulating you on your award. It’s very exciting!
AL: Yes, it is very exciting.
RH: What is it that you’re going to be doing, is it a collaborative piece?
AL: Absolutely, yeah. There were three winning artists and we’re going to be collaborating together on a residency in London in September at the Departure Gallery.
RH: I looked up the other two artists, Akeelah Bertram and Emma Gee, and they both seem to be quite performance based.
AL: Emma Gee is definitely, she is a participatory theatre artist.
RH: And Bertram is more installation work so it’s quite different to your own output. Do you think this collaboration will mark a movement personally for your work?
AL: Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I’m most excited about really. I don’t want to say too much because we haven’t had a meeting about it yet so I don’t know exactly what the parameters are but basically working together in a collaborative way is really exciting. I’m really happy to be encouraged to work in this way.
RotVälta, credit ALilleengen
RH: Have you done any collaborative stuff before?
AL: No, and that’s why I’m really excited about it. And it’s obviously a departure and that’s always going to bring with it excitement but also a challenge of doing something new. I’m definitely seeing that in a positive sense in that it’s encouraging me to grow and in the direction that I anyway want to go in. I think one of the things when you’re studying is that it becomes quite a solitary occupation unless you’re working with other people doing performance or live art.
Particularly with the type of work that I’ve been doing, it’s very much dark room based and also the project that I worked on throughout the course of my MA that won this prize, both have been quite solitary and about the experience of being on your own in the woods . It’s also about my experience [of being] between two different cultures [British and Swedish].
So this year I’ve been doing quite a lot to build networks, so I’ve been working with Pavilion in Leeds which is an arts commissioning organisation who every year mentor young and up-and-coming artists. I’ve been mentored by Gill Park and one of the things which she has helped me to do it build social and artistic networks and part of that has been finding out about the Vantage Prize and applying for it. I would never have known about it otherwise.
RH: It’s not something which I’ve heard of either.
AL: No, well it’s only the second one. I think the Departure Foundation is only three years old and it’s privately funded. They had their first [Vantage Prize] in February.
RH: Oh, so it’s not going to be just annual?
AL: I don’t know what it’s going to be… Biannual? No, I’m not sure as yet.
But what the Departure Foundation have done is take over Ellington House which is an office block in south Leeds. On Thursday night [27th June, 2013] there was an exhibition by an artist collective called HOARD which I think is working towards “an archaeology of an artist’s mind”. It’s a number of artists in the Leeds area who are working over the course of a year and every two months they will meet and exhibit work on how they’re doing on this project. For some people is things that they’re hoarding while they’re working on the project and for others it’s kind of part and parcel of the project. It’s different for each artist. They will be taking over all the floors of this four story building.
In lots of different ways I’m very keen to be pushing my practice on in what I do and I’d like to see it as an ongoing project in some ways. So when I’m out there taking pictures that explore a similar vein I’m really hoping to challenge and open up.
RH: They’re really quite different as well: from something that’s very labour intensive to something that’s going to be collaborative.
AL: Yeah which doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that it isn’t going to be labour intensive. I think I’d, currently, feels that it would be a bit wrong if it wasn’t. If it didn’t have a lot of process to it I’d kind of feel that I was moving too quickly and too far away from my current practice. My work is quite process driven and a lot of it is about the materiality of the medium; making the negatives, the negatives getting scratched in the camera by the remnant chemical, the light flares. It’s a reflection on material and physicality.
Anna told me that she was particularly excited about this because of the encouragement of the local arts scene, trying to retain it by supporting graduates who may otherwise move to London. She sees it as ‘challenging’ the London-based bubble.
There are lots of thriving artistic cities outside of the capital, she tells me. Manchester for one, with its Blank Media collective and Open Eye in Liverpool.
She is very insistent that her work sit within an art historical context; this stems from becoming widely read in critical theory during her MA which she completed at the Harrogate School of Art and Design. Of particular relevance to Anna’s practice are William Morris and Walter Benjamin whose writings and work, though from entirely different periods to our own and to each other, are influential for their belief in ‘the dignity of the craftsman’. This clearly comes through in Anna’s labour intensive work. Every detail of the process and output give insight to a desire to make something and to carefully consider what that means. The scratch marks on the prints’ surface come from the plates, each handmade and exposed individually.
Another key aspect of the process is linked to theory: time passing as the image is exposed onto the plate. Sally Mann, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes. All of these thinkers agreed on the idea that photography records time passing. For Anna, the exposure time which lasts for about ten minutes is in part a way of “feeling the time” and simultaneously “stepping out” of it; she describes herself as a privileged “witness”. For me, the beauty of Lillengeen’s images are how every section of the undergrowth and each leaf seems to seep time, to glow with it, totally saturated.
Bereavement is the most intriguing element of what Anna considers the photographs to show. Sally Mann’s critical theory suggests that as photographs document time they also document death. Decay does seem implicit to Lillengeen’s images, as the edges of the vignette encroach on the scene and the crispness of certain details express a transience which can never be expected to last.
Blackcurrent Bush I, credit ALlilleegen
AL: During my MA I spent the first year really developing my idea and the technique and the process and also experimenting and exploring, starting with pinholes. Actually, it was going to a Tate Modern exhibition, it was an exhibition called Photographic Typologies which I saw in the first term, I think it was November 2011, and there was all this August Sander, and Hilla and Bernd Becher. It just reminded me to go back to the roots of photography, to black and white.
You were asking how I get into photography and when; I’ve always photographed – I know that’s a real cliche to say! – but I discovered my first roll of film the other week and it’s all sepia tinged trees in winter reflected in the river Nid, up near Pateley Bridge and actually I still really like the images. It’s funny how you can start with something and I’m now still taking pictures of trees.
So, I’ve always taken pictures and I’ve always wanted to do photography, it’s just that I’ve kind of, like many people of my generation, been encouraged to go down an academic line and get a career and not be dependant, not get married and have kids too early. That’s what I was brought up with in Thatcher’s Britain.
After I came back from travelling along the Silk Route it changed, and I studied full-time. It was amazing; we went through some completely unexplored, non touristy places. We were really off the beaten track.
RH: Do you think your background of studying History has influenced you in a way that if you had just studied Fine Art it wouldn’t have come through?
AL: That’s a really good question… I’ve never thought to compare it with a Fine Art course. I definitely think that studying History has influenced me massively. Also, growing up in a family background where history is valued quite a lot and old things are valued.
It’s very easy to take on a surface level; ‘Oh History, and you have a Victorian camera. That makes sense.’ But actually, History isn’t about objects, History is about ideas isn’t it. I’m really interested in Walter Benjamin and William Morris.
The reason I’m interested in Morris is his ideology of trying to preserve something of the craftsman, the dignity of the craftsman in an age when you’d had industrialisation. People had been objecting to factories and everything even earlier, but for more moral reasons. William Morris was more concerned with actually how people felt working in a really disjointed way just doing one repetitive task like they do in China now. It definitely has implications for today. He was an early Socialist idealist, really.
Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and ‘30s and his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which is quite deep really. He again talks about the dignity, not of the worker, but of the work of art and the aura of the work of art. I think this is so relevant today. He says that the audience is braying to get closer and closer and the closer they get, the more they break up what is an individual, unique, discrete object. That makes so much sense, doesn’t it?
Moving Stones, credit ALilleengen
It was at this point that we turned to the topic of Shamanism which Anna tells me was an influence on the aims of her photographic series. The traditions and rites which are important during transitions into adulthood and other significant parts of life were representative of what Anna wanted her images to communicate.
AL: You tell yourself, ‘This is what I am.’ Think beyond your own narrative essentially to a point where you’re challenged to act outside of that because acting from your everyday state of being doesn’t really work when you’re in the woods, in the deep woods.
If you liken it to any kind of life changing experience or something that you’re not really used to where you’re challenged to develop new skills, essentially you’re walking blind for a while. Then you come back from exploring those sides of yourself without any expectations of what you’re going to find, and without fear. Definitely I think that that ambivalence that you can see in the pictures, I’d like to think it’s like when you’re having a life changing experience, and when you’re really up against something that you don’t know how you’re going to manage. It’s got a psychological level to it; going beyond what you’ve told yourself this is about.
From there, Anna moved back to Western art theory and introduced an idea which I think is a pertinent point to end on:
AL: Another person who I’d namecheck on death and photography is a French artist called Christian Boltanski. He did some really interesting work on subject and other. Actually, taken out of context this is going to sound really morbid! He was quite fascinated by how something that is a subject at the moment of death turns into an object. In the woods you see a lot of decomposition and it can either feel like a really life enhancing place with lots of beautiful sparkling brooks and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is some kind of paradise,’ and then another time you can be there and it can be deathly quiet without the birds, the chicks have been raised and moved on.
Instead of feeling like being underwater or being in a really creative womb-like place you feel like it’s almost like a coffin. It’s almost like a stage – you project onto it your own present state of mind. Your feelings, your fears, expectations.
Waterfall, credit ALilleengen
