Joanne Leonard

Joanne Leonard uses photo-collage to create ‘intimate documentary’. HackelBury will exhibit selections from Leonard’s on-going project, Newspaper Diary (2006 - ) that involves another kind of memory work—a pairing of press photographs from newspapers with images from art history and other illustrated books that remind us of older media, soon to be archaic memories, such as printed newspapers and hardcopy books. Leonard’s newspaper diarying performs a commentary on personal associations and on cultural memory traversing the space between the museum and the news and now digital media revealing a shared visual imaginary—the cultural store of images and image-memories—that shape the way we understand our present in pre-coded image repertoires of bodies and scenarios. Her daily practice of connecting images from the news with paintings and historical images from books also serve to mark time in her own life. Their creation enables her personally ‘to register the day’s passing’ while ‘responding to things in the world’ as the world’s diarist in images.