‘Art in Progress’ is an exploration of art schools across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Leonora Hamill photographed empty studios in art schools marked with the richness of the activities undertaken by the students. These images, shot with a large format camera and printed analogically, are intentionally detailed, frontal and neutral. They invite the spectator to enter the studios in these schools and observe the freshly used tools of the trade which are perceived as traces that indicate, or allow us to imagine, the artistic experimentation that take place there.
From this body of work emerge the similarities and contrasts, both didactic and atmospheric, of the many art schools she has photographed. The images are characterized by a silence loaded with absent presences and a collective vitality, as such they become a sort of tracing paper that reveals the artistic tensions present within these spaces, the people who have passed through them, and the stories from past and present etched into the walls of studios from Saigon to Santiniketan and Poznan to Tetouan.
