BIO

Anna Lilleengen is a process-based fine art photographer who works with vintage cameras and analogue techniques. Turning her attention to subtle shifts in the natural light, these along with the materiality of the medium become the subject of her images.

Anna has held over 20 exhibitions both in the UK and in Scandinavia since gaining a distinction in her MA at Harrogate College in 2012. A winner of the Vantage Art Prize, she received Arts Council funding via Sunny Bank Mills to produce the first (of three) Metamorphosis series in 2014. Also from Leeds Council for her Mythical Rothwell project in 2015.  

A member of the first SelfScapes research cluster, she has also collaborated with Sheffield Hallam at their Northern Light photography conference (2016) and exhibition (2016 & 2018), and in 2020 exhibited at the Force of Nature show at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate next to JMW Turner’s images from his seventeenth and eighteenth century tours of the North.

ABOUT THE ART

This year, my thoughts have turned to how one relates and responds as an atomised individual unit to others, to groups of people in particular. How we ally and square off individual actions with our ethics, and with the needs and vulnerabilities of larger collectives.

How do we position ourselves in relation to others? Or do we unconsciously assume that we are separate from others, and that our actions have no impact?

Reading too about projection and the Unconscious, I have been reflecting on how the more we draw into ourselves, the more we seem to unconsciously cast our shadows out onto others, idealising or demonising.

The forest acts as carrier of our own mysteries, much as the Other does; the lens as mediator between an inner experience and outer reality. The resulting image operates as an ontological tensile force between a collective unconscious unspoken and a conception formulated and expressed.