Struck by Light is an international group of female-identifying photographic artists who push beyond the boundaries of photography.

“Light’s immateriality challenges its makers today, analogue versus digital doubles our challenges. It is here, in modern and contemporary art, that one finds a “linked ring” to characteristics within the DNA of photography - science, optics, shadow, reflection, silhouette, process, chemistry - that today’s practitioners underscore in their concepts, enriching content, adding context, citing this history at the dawn of medium to now in their versions of drawing with light.”

Ellen Carey

Our ‘common ground’ is found within our photographic approach. We test, experiment, teach, and learn from each other. Our diverse practices operate within the liminal space between traditional photographic processes and what might be regarded as ‘women’s toil’. This highly experimental work reflects the messy, unpredictable, and sometimes accidental nature of our work as women and artists.

Ellen Carey:
Ellen Carey is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer and lens-based artist, whose unique experimental work (1974-2018) spans several decades. Her early work Painted Self-Portraits (1978) were first exhibited at Hallwalls, one of the first artist-run alternative space, home to the Buffalo avant-garde — Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman — and led to a group exhibit The Altered Photograph at PS 1, another avant-garde institution. The visionary curator, Linda Cathcart, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (AKAG) selected Carey’s work for this exhibition as well as The Heroic Figure, which presented thirteen American artists for the São Paulo Biennale including: Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe; South/North American tour (1984-1986).

Ellen Carey’s work has been the subject of 55 one-person exhibitions in museums, alternative spaces, university, college and commercial galleries (1978-2018) - highlights: Dings, Shadows and Pulls, Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA); Photography Degree Zero Matrix#153 Wadsworth Athene-um Museum of Art; Mourning Wall Real Art Ways; femme brut(e) Lyman Allyn Art Museum; Struck by Light Saint Joseph University; Ellen Carey: Survey ICP/NY; upcoming retrospective titled Struck by Light: The Experimental Photography of Ellen Carey, Burchfield - Penney Art Center (BPAC), received funding (30K) from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (NY, NY) for 2020.

Her work seen in hundreds of group exhibitions (1974-2020) in museums, alternative spaces, university and college galleries, non-profits and commercial venues; highlighted in permanent collections of over 60 photography and art museums: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery (AKAG), The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA), George Eastman Museum (GEM), Museum at the Chicago Art Institute, Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA), Norton Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Whitney Museum of American Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery while corporate collections include: Banana Republic and JP Morgan Chase Collection; noted private include: The LeWitt Foundation and Sir Elton John Collection.

Cristina Fontsare:
Cristina Fontsare, a Barcelona-born artist, studied Fine Arts, focusing on sculpture before expanding her education in London and Paris.

In her thirties, she discovered photography while pursuing a master’s in Landscape Architecture. Dedicated to long-term projects, she explores universal themes like life cycles and vulnerability through analog and peel-apart Polaroid films.

Her work, characterised by an organic process and strong collaborator relationships, has been exhibited internationally and featured in publications such as The British Journal of Photography, The Guardian and L´Oeil de la Photographie. Fontsare has received numerous awards, with her work held in public and private collections in Spain and the USA.

Liz Harrington:
Liz Harrington’s experimental practice is currently focused on the natural environment and themes of transience, fragility and traces of the past.

The works are from the project ‘Where Land Runs Out’, which consists of a series of camera-less cyanotype images made at Shingle Street beach in Suffolk, on the east coast of England. This body of work forms part of a wider ongoing project based around Orford Ness and Shingle Street. It is a desolate landscape, with a vast open expanse of shingle, subject to coastal erosion and sea level rises, and at risk of disappearing. Here, light sensitive cyanotype paper was physically immersed in the sea during periods of high and low tide. The resulting images capture the fleeting traces of the waves, wind, sediment, and of the past, creating new and changing landscapes. The images have not been fully fixed and will continue to subtly change over time, reflecting the constantly changing landscape.

Poppy Lekner:
Poppy Lekner holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons), Massey University, Wellington, a Post Graduate Diploma Teaching, and a Bachelor of Science, Victoria University, Wellington in New Zealand.
Working with the play between external structures and physical experience Lekner’s process uses the sungram to directly generate (from the sun’s rays on photographic emulsion) a record of presence of an artifact or material. Her recent series of work Horizons is a merging of scientific approach and the unsteady mark making of the hand.

Ky Lewis:
Ky Lewis is an artist working experimentally and is based in the slow lane, she works in a variety of ways using both cameraless and pinhole, traditional and alternative. Lewis prefers a more serendipitous workflow, allowing accidents to steer work into new directions. She enjoys painting with light and chemicals allowing this to bring a personal response to the creative process within the confines of the darkroom. Always busy on a number of projects simultaneously, her work is process driven and her interests are in landscape, cycles of life, memory, death and decay.

Anna Luk:
Working with cameraless analogue photographic processes, her practice explores the ontology of photography by pursuing qualities typically tethered to painting and sculpture. She works with the materiality and the ability of the medium to not only depict an external subject but also record the physical actions exerted on it. Anna Luk holds a BA (Hons) Photography, Arts University Bournemouth and is a co founder of the of the expanded photography collective, Tied to Light.

Megan Ringrose:
Megan Ringrose is an artist-curator-researcher with a background in Fine Art and a Master's degree in Photography from Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. Her artistic practice revolves around exploring the connections between the history of photography and contemporary fine art photography.

In her artistic work, Ringrose uses brushes and paper to create pieces that draw inspiration from both painting and photography. Her aesthetic is defined by a study of the substrate (such as paper, glass, wood), light, and process. Through this exploration, she aims to understand and reference the historical practices and inventions of photography, connecting them to the way photography is used in the present day.

Her research interests centre on the invention of photography, with a particular focus on the relationship between historical photography and the ancient art of ink and dye making. In this context, she intertwines the narrative with the use of plants, adding another layer of complexity to her exploration.

Nettie Edwards:
The daughter of partially sighted and blind parents, in particular, a father who trained as a photographer at a school for blind children, Edwards is fascinated by Humanity’s biological, philosophical and spiritual relationship with light, in particular, the role played by light as an agent of memory via the medium of photography. Her work is practice led, experimental and site specific. The themes explored emerge from immersion in residency locations; long-term historical research projects and working with photographic archives.

Particularly drawn to examinations of loss, mourning and melancholy, Edwards describes herself as a scavenger, a detective who sometimes forges documents and evidences. Recognised as an early innovator of the Smartphone photography movement, for which she is named as a contemporary experimental photography reference in the 2019 A-level Art & Design paper for Pearson Edexel, Edwards also works with vintage, plastic or homemade analogue cameras, together with free lensing techniques and camera-less photography. Site specific installation, found narratives and speculative fiction are components of her practice, referencing a background as a theatrical designer (1981 - 2017). A desire to wander, to create art whilst making long distance train journeys, is possibly a relic of her Romany heritage: something the artist explored extensively in her creative practice as a socially engaged artist and documentary photographer (2000 - 2009).

Edwards is committed to making work that is sustainable and regards the landscapes and gardens she works in as creative collaborators. Since 2014, Edwards has been researching the Anthotype and Chlorophyll processes, growing the plants I make prints within her garden and two allotments in the English Cotswolds.