Natalie LeBlanc

Natalie LeBlanc received a BFA and MA from Concordia University (Montréal) and a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). She is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working with paint, photography, printmaking, textiles, and digital technologies through a wide range of artistic processes and practices. She is particularly interested in how artistic practice actualizes ways of seeing beyond the ordinary or the habitual, providing opportunities for learning that are relational, performative, and complex. Natalie has exhibited her work locally as well as across Canada. Her artistic research has made methodological contributions to visual inquiry and practice-led research, modes of inquiry that recognize how making, learning, and knowing are interconnected within pedagogical practices. She has won awards from the American Education Research Association (AERA), the National Art Education Association (NAEA), and the Canadian Society for Education through Art (CSEA). Natalie’s work has been published in a variety of national and international publications including The International Journal of Art and Design Education (IJADE), The International Journal of Education through Art (IJETA), The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (JCRAE), The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education (JSTAE), Visual Arts Research (VAR), and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Further to this, she has been invited to write chapters in book projects from the most respectable senior scholars in the arts-based methods area such as, The Handbook of Arts Based Research (Guilford Press), The Second Edition of Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice (Routledge) and A/r/tography: Essential Readings and Conversations (Intellect). Over the last decade, Natalie has presented in over 45 National and International conferences, sharing her artistic research with communities of scholars in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Finland, Turkey, Namibia, and New Zealand. She is currently an Associate Professor in Art Education at the University of Victoria where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students a range of studio, digital, and arts-based methodological courses.

As an artist, I have always been drawn to the abandoned. To empty lots, boarded up homes, buildings that have fallen into disrepair. In my studio, I am revisiting the photographic work produced as part of my doctoral studies for which I photographed a series of abandoned schools as they stood in their liminal glory, puncturing the Canadian landscape. I am making paintings based on some of these compositions, scratching through layers of paint and creating a network of new and emergent masses of mostly continuous but sometimes broken and tangled lines. I am observing how marks that were left behind in the abandoned school begin to take on multiple forms. Sometimes they appear as a tâche (a stain) but more often, they become layered over one another like a palimpsest with multiple partial impressions resembling Freud’s mystic writing pad. The dents, engravings, signs, and in some cases, actual handwriting, corroborate an un/known story. Through their accumulation, however, I am not simply documenting physical impressions left by previous actions, I am creating a new space where I feel connected to a complex ecology of things ––objects, bodies, times, spaces and places–– drawing me into their depth as an entangled relation.