About Dr Marjolaine Ryley
I am an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Photography. I work with analogue and digital photography, eco-printing, moving image, creative writing, and archives. I have exhibited my work both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Street Level Photoworks Gallery, Glasgow, Impressions Gallery, Bradford, and The Palacio des Artes, Porto.
My publications include ‘Villa Mona – A Proper Kind of House’ Trace Editions, 2006, ‘Field Study 7 Residence Astral’ PARC, 2009 and 'Growing Up in the New Age', Daylight NYC, 2013.
In 2020 my work was shown at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in a mid-career retrospective exhibition 'This is What I See(opens in new tab)'. Using photography, video, creative text, and archival materials I explored a range of themes linking autobiography to wider political issues.
I have recently completed a PhD funded by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC) Time, Image, Archive: Visualising gardening communities through auto-ethnographic photographic practice(opens in new tab).
Teaching and supervision
Interests
- Photography and autobiography/auto-ethnography
- Photography and the family archive
- Photography, moving Image and the counterculture
- Photography and sustainability/ ecology
- Photography, moving image and invisible illness/loss
Research
My practice uses photography, plants, creative writing, and archival materials to explore a range of themes and issues that look at linking personal experiences to broader social and political narratives. These include family, memory, counterculture, gardening/women/politics, and more than human worlds. My work moves between the personal album and the social document.
'This is What I See' was a solo exhibition held at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in 2019. Bringing together 20 years of my practice, this show included a number of bodies of work exploring themes of family, history, memory, counterculture, the garden, invisible illness, and the use of autobiography as an artistic methodology. A new publication will accompany this exhibition.
Previous projects:
A Gardener’s Daughter(opens in new tab) explores the relationship between art, gardening, and wellbeing through a practice-based research methodology. Through this project, I am exploring themes such as ‘Women and Gardens’, ‘Radical Gardening’, and ‘Politics of Gardening’. I am also exploring these themes through Doctoral Research as a Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership-funded student based in Fine Art at Newcastle University.
Growing up in the New Age explored the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s considering the utopian ideals and problematic areas of the darker side to the 'New Age'. It also asked what we might learn from them today.
The Last Picture Show: In 2006 I received a Research Development Fellowship to undertake 'The Last Picture Show', a project looking at the changing nature of family photography in the digital age. This fellowship was a collaboration with Professor Val Williams at ‘The Photography and the Archive Research Centre' (PARC) and led to outputs including a Field Study publication 'Residence Astral'.