Leah Crossley provides an in-depth look at a handmade box and handwritten journal that she has created in this piece during her time at Wales Arts Review as part of the Artists in Residence series. Throughout 2017 artists, including Leah Crossley will take a leading creative role in what Wales Arts Review publishes, centring their skills on a challenging project over the course of a month. We were inundated with applications, receiving hundreds of emails about the positions, and it was no easy task whittling down all that talent to this final eleven. Our team of six editors debated long into the night, and in the end, we decided on a collection of people who we most want to work with, and whose work excites us. We think you will be excited by them too.
Leah Crossley is a photographic-artist, with no formal training in photography. Her projects emanate from a personal approach to camera art, digital image-making and collage that has been evolving since 2010. She employs an experimental approach to photographic processes; layering is an integral component to my visual interpretations and interventions, eg. through collage, multiple-exposures, blurring, transposing, embedding text and image into pre-existing publications.
Her residency with Wales Arts Review will provide time and space through which to disclose personal artistic developments in relation to herself as an artist, via deeper exploration into the journaling process and its value as an artistic tool of discovery and expression. It will also contribute to the development of a self-directed Artist Residency in Motherhood as a vehicle for extending and developing her focus, and to establish a framework within which she can explore ways of working as a new Mother and creating work about Motherhood.
A Handmade Box and a Handwritten Journal: visualising words from 2016 and remembering the playful making and dreaming with papier-mache.
I made this box to house the journal that I wrote when I was pregnant and kept throughout 2016. I made this box at a short course in West Dean College in Chichester 16 – 20 April 2017, facilitated by a wonderful artist and maker Julie Arkell.
This contribution by Leah Crossley is part of the Artists in Residence series.
