Margaret LeJeune
Biography
Margaret LeJeune is an image-maker, curator, and educator from Rochester, New York (USA). She received an MFA from Visual Studies Workshop. Her creative practice, which is anchored in photography, marries art, science, and technology. Drawing from a place-based approach, her work focuses on the climate crisis including investigations of habitat loss, sea level rise, the current mass extinction event, and our precarious relationship to the natural world. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions including The Griffin Museum of Photography (USA), The Center for Fine Art Photography (USA), ARC Gallery (USA), Circe Gallery Cape Town (South Africa), Science Cabin (South Korea), and Umbrella Arts (USA). LeJeune has been invited to create work at several residency programs which foster collaboration between the arts and sciences including the Global Nomadic Art Project – The Ephemeral River, University of Notre Dame Research Center, Trout Lake Research Station, Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation - Ives Lake Field Station, and the 2023 Changing Climate Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute. She has been awarded two Puffin Foundation Artist Grants, The Sally A. Williams Artist Grant, and was recently named the 2023 Woman Science Photographer of the Year by the Royal Photographic Society. Her work has been published in numerous publications including Culture, Community, and Climate: Conversations from art.earth press and Embodied Forest from ecoartspace. LeJeune is an Associate Professor of Photography at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
Thirteen Hours to Fall Project Statement
Thirteen Hours to Fall examines the climate crisis through investigations of contemporary and future littoral zones. This project includes large-format color photographs, collage imagery, sculptural book forms, and 19th century-inspired salted paper prints created with water collected at the site of a ghost forest on the eastern shore of the United States. Manifest with the sea itself as a collaborative image maker, salt from the northern Atlantic is distilled to form the photographic emulsion used to visualize the changing landscape around us.
As the climate warms, sea levels rise and saltwater encroaches on coastal communities. This is both an ecological crisis and an environmental justice issue. Invading seawater advances and overtakes the fresh water that deciduous trees - including pine, red maple, sweetgum and bald cypress - rely upon for sustenance. The brackish water slowly poisons trees, decimating coastal upland stands, leaving “ghost forests” of dead and dying timber. With saplings and mature trees poisoned by the saltwater intrusion, the overstory disappears and saltwater marsh, with tolerant plants like grasses and shrubs, takes over. While this transition to marsh alone isn’t necessarily detrimental, over time the marsh is overtaken as well, leading to areas of open water and land loss. Results of this shifting landscape include massive tree deaths, diminished carbon storage and biodiversity, and critical impacts on local communities. Ghost forests foretell future problems including saltwater damage to crops, contaminated drinking water, and loss of residential and commercial land. Studies show that ecological system collapse, such as the loss of coastal upland forests, can trigger an economic collapse.
These works ask the viewer to bear witness to the complex history of this region, a landscape dramatically altered overtime by the colonial timber industry, plantation farming practices, and climate change. This interdisciplinary and intersectional project is informed by environmental histories including indigenous and maroon communities’ land management, geography, hydrology, and maritime traditions, including mapping and way-finding.