Feminist Photography Network: Hannah Laycock & Flannery O’Kafka

This special event has been programmed to coincide with the launch of Identity, Connection and Place, a new online exhibition by the Feminist Photography Network. Participating artists Hannah Laycock and Flannery O’Kafka will give presentations on their practice to date, in discussion with Jennifer Long and Clare Samuel.

Intimate and sometimes confessional, Flannery O’Kafka’s work explores sexuality, religion and kinship through a neurodivergent lens. The artist uses vulnerability, humour, and a sensuality of colour and shape to communicate on an emotional level. Her photographic and text work express the joy and pain of navigating the world in an all too mortal body.

Through constructed self-portraiture and documenting her environment, Hannah Laycock explores the experience of living in a human body. The artist, who lives with Multiple Sclerosis, uses visual strategies to communicate where the limitations of language fail. Her tactile images reflect experiences of transition, loss and illness.

Feminist Photography Network (FPN) is a shifting collective run by co-directors Jennifer Long and Clare Samuel based in Tkaronto (Toronto). Long and Samuel are both mid-career artists, as well as curators, arts administrators, and educators with extensive connections and experience in the arts community. After attending the Fast Forward: Women & Photography conference at Tate Modern in November 2015, Long and Samuel were moved to continue this vital discussion around gender and our medium. Clare Samuel is originally from the UK and so used her contacts in the art and photography world to begin to create connections between woman-identifying practitioners in both Canada and the United Kingdom.

Launching on International Women’s Day (8th March 2023) Identity, Connection and Place at FPNexhibit.com showcases the work of sixteen artists and seven arts writers. An on-site exhibition will run concurrently in the vitrines at A Space gallery in Toronto, and a selection of images will play on a slideshow in the Trongate 103 foyer, outside Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow.