“One could say that collage allows a dialog, conversation, or push and pull – a layering of the past onto images from the present, a representation of dreams and even nightmares with collage layered onto scenes made in the light of day.” - Joanne Leonard
HackelBury presents the first UK solo exhibition by acclaimed artist, Joanne Leonard. Vintage Photographs and Early Collages features photographs from the 1960s and 1970s and unique early collage pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. This retrospective offers an intimate look into Leonard’s artistic evolution and her innovative approach to visual storytelling.
“Artists are not turning inwards to preserve, or even indulge in the pleasures of their medium/media. They are expanding the very capacities of their mediums and media both to formulate meaning and to affect us by each artist’s aesthetic process.” - Griselda Pollock
Known for her evocative and deeply personal imagery, which she describes as ‘intimate documentary,’ Leonard’s work from this era captures a profound sense of time and place. Blending documentary photography with poetic, dreamlike compositions, she draws inspiration from intimate family scenes, the realities of motherhood, and the political and social unrest of the time. The works on display offer an unfiltered glimpse into life as she experienced it. Her early collages, incorporating found imagery, handwritten text, and layered textures, reflect an experimental approach which challenges conventional artistic boundaries.
" I’m much inspired by looking at medieval works - particularly diptychs and triptychs – these forms are sometimes hinged and have doors that fold over the artwork – then open to reveal the imagery inside…. a suggestion of time and story unfolding.” - Joanne Leonard
Leonard’s practice provides a striking glimpse into the social and cultural landscapes of the mid-20th century, portraying moments of everyday life with a deeply humanistic perspective. Underpinned by a feminist ideology, she recognises overlooked intimate and personal moments within women’s lives.
Inspired by the work of Mary Cassatt and Käthe Kollwitz, Leonard’s focus on the objects and artifacts of women’s lives is applied to both her early black and white photography, and to her photo collage and mixed media work, to create a distinct visual language.
“In artwork I’d come to know growing up, if there was a focus on women it was most often as subjects of the male gaze – nude studies were most often made by men. These did not reflect the daily lives of women – or the world from the women’s own perspectives.” Joanne Leonard
About Joanne Leonard
Joanne Leonard is an American artist renowned for her transformative and expansive conceptual photographic practice. This later developed into new forms of photo-collage to explore the overlooked spaces, conditions and moments within women’s working and parenting lives. In her series Dreams and Nightmares, she addresses heterosexual desire and its tragedies as well as images of the strange and often disturbing beauty of modern domestic appliances and kitchen spaces. Leonard’s work was hailed early by American feminist critic Lucy Lippard in her collection From the Center (1976). Leonard is also widely studied for intermedial work, text and images in Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008).
Leonard’s photographs have been collected by and featured in exhibitions at major museums, including; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, New York and the Harry Ransome Center, Austin, Texas. Her work was shown in the group exhibition Medium & Memory, curated by Griselda Pollock at HackelBury in 2023 and work has recently been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her work is currently on show at the ICP in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In addition to her celebrated artistic practice, Leonard has cultivated a distinguished record as both scholar and educator. Leonard is one of the few photographers and women artists published in Janson’s History of Art. She completed thirty-one years on the faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, earning the title of Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollock Distinguished University Professor in 2004. During her tenure, Leonard was Director of the Program in Visual Culture at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for three years and received the John H. D’arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities in 2001. She retired in 2009 after dedicating forty years of her life to teaching as a college professor.
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