Leanne is an artist filmmaker. Grounded in intersectional feminism, her work is focused on gender, feminist spiritual practices, mythology and the natural world, and the relations between them.
For her residency project, Leanne raised the question “How do we get to the body we live in?” It cannot be accessed directly but must be mediated through various ideological frameworks. She worked on a single-channel digital film focusing on the experience of living with the highly contested Lyme disease and use it as a lens through which to explore the limitations of the frameworks we have to understand our bodies, and how these ideological frameworks influence our identity and sense of self.
Leanne used recorded testimony of several people affected by Lyme disease, who have experienced the uncertainty and anxiety of a lack of diagnosis, or the stigma of a psychological diagnosis. She captured the terror and dissociation which comes with being told that there’s nothing physically wrong, even as one feels one’s body is failing. In her film, Leanne also explored the implications for a doctor who has reached the limit of their understanding and is unable to help their patient.
Still from work in progress, © the artist