Gina Lundy studied Documentary Photography at Newport School of Art, Media and Design, gaining a Masters in Fine Art in 2009. Starting work in the commercial sector as an assistant to advertising photographers, Gina’s work later became interested in the identity of people and place as she worked on long term projects with grass root organisations within the community.
Gina is currently a freelance photographer and educational co-ordinator at the Knowle West Media Centre, where she runs weekly photography workshops and works as a project facilitator. She is has been nominated as an MAstar by Axis contemporary art this year.
Academy
Academy documents the transition of Withywood Community School in south Bristol, as it makes the change from the old comprehensive blocks to the new academy school. The portraits of the students and their changing surroundings subtly note the shifting identity of the educational landscape in this nationwide pattern of regeneration.
unititled, 2008
“My photographic practice is driven by a desire to engage with people and the issues that have a real effect on their everyday lives. Having a camera gives me a licence to explore and investigate. I want to make sense of a situation, laying out the information and creating a visual order, finding the patterns so as to question the intentions behind them.
The surfaces of things, of people and of places, attract and engage my attention. I feel a need to peel back the surface layers; not so much those of an individual life but that of the history of a place and those who inhabit it. What a place can represent – its past and present incarnations, and how the individual locates himself within that space.
That space can be tangible as with the Academy project; the transition of a school community from one environment to another, the changing bodies of adolescent students, or the space could be psychological.
I am interested in creating work that engages with the identity of communities during a period of change, locating the work in its cultural, historical and social context. I would like to create work that explores the dynamics within the relationships between government policy, private developer, sponsorship (in the case of education and sport) and the local community.
The desires of different generations to re-build, transform or start anew, is cyclical in nature. I would like to create work that responds to the history of a community/place and locates individuals within it, noting the subtle repetitions in aspiration in relation to current patterns of urban regeneration.”
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