Artist Talk: Our Place in Time with Ted Leeming
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How might photography, decomposing underpants and a pile of fridges help us understand the forces shaping Scotland's land?
Over the past five years, artist and photographer Ted Leeming has explored Scotland's changing rural and urban environments through an interdisciplinary enquiry combining visual practice (including 3000 miles of immersive cycles across the country), environmental science, geography and lived experience.
This talk offers an opportunity to engage with the ideas emerging from that work, asking how different ways of seeing can reveal the values, assumptions and governance structures embedded within the places we inhabit.
Through a comparative and relational approach, Ted examines recurring tensions between efficiency and resilience, short- and long-term thinking, economic and ecological value, and human and more-than-human interests.
Rather than presenting finished conclusions, the talk opens a conversation about photography and art as a form of enquiry and its potential to contribute to environmental, ecological and cultural research. It also offers an early insight into how this evolving body of work will inform Ted's forthcoming practice-led PhD, inviting discussion from researchers, students and practitioners across disciplines.
This event is part of the Stirling Photography Festival and is a joint event between the University Art Collection, the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
Speaker: Ted Leeming
My practice engages with climate change, biodiversity, place and the cultural narratives driving our twin existential emergencies — and with the role of arts and photography in responding to them.
Based in Galloway, I’m drawn to immersive, low-impact projects and place-based explorations of environmental and social relevance, delivered through research, engagement, and collaborative, audience specific outcomes. I prefer plain language and interactive engagement to start conversations, shift behaviours, and influence policy.
Photography — traditional, abstract, and alternative — sits at the core of my practice, increasingly augmented by multi-sensory approaches, AV, mapping, illustration, and accompanying words.
I work independently and with my wife Morag Paterson, as Leeming + Paterson.