Lindsey french
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About Lindsey
Lindsey french is an artist, educator and writer whose work engages in multi-sensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. They have shared their work internationally in museums, galleries, screenings, and D.I.Y. art spaces including the SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), and OCAD's Onsite Gallery (Toronto). Recent publications include chapters for Media, Practice and Theory: Tracking emergent thresholds of experience (Vernon, 2023), Ambiguous Territory (Actar, 2022), Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge, 2021), and Why Look at Plants (Brill, 2019). They earned a BA through an interdisciplinary course of study at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in the prairie landscape of Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan since 2021, french is based in Visual Arts, and teaches as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.
french’s research-based, interdisciplinary creative practice draws from media studies, olfaction, botany, and ecology to consider the nature of media. They are particularly interested in investigating receptive media in new media discourse, rooted in ecocritical, feminist, and decolonial practices. Receptive media emphasizes the importance of embodied and multisensory practices (i.e., listening, smelling, breathing, or ingesting) as crucial forms of human experience, considered within multispecies, environmental, and material contexts of communication. Her research includes long-term projects (such as her plant-based media project, Phytovision), a newer thread of research which considers the role of olfaction (or smelling) within the context of climate futures and the atmosphere as a shared, multispecies space, as well as ongoing work in sound art and sound studies. This year, they were awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, for the creation of an Olfactory Media Library, a mobile field research and creation station for sensing air quality with DIY technologies, with collaborators in the United States.
french teaches a variety of studio courses which focus on interdisciplinarity and learning through making. In their classes, they utilize self-reflection activities and alternative assessments to help students develop and hone their creative practices. She teaches collaboration as a skill that can be learned, and facilitates different models for collaborative and collective creative work, including developing opportunities for students to perform, exhibit, and share their work in public.