Chrystel Lebas

Biography

Chrystel Lebas is a London based visual artist interested in encouraging a wider understanding of the complex encounter between humankind and the nature world. She employs photography, the moving image and sound to explore and reveal multifaceted histories concealed in landscapes, investigating a variety of sites to which she returns over extended periods of time during key moments of change.
In the past years she has been working on significant projects looking at landscapes, environmental change and the Anthropocene.
Her work ‘Regarding Forests’ combined large photographs, sound and scent to create an immersive installation commissioned and exhibited at the Wellcome Collection in ‘On Happiness’ and touring at The German Hygiene Museum in Dresden.
She is currently Research Fellow at Forestry England, looking at forest resilience.
Lebas has collaborated with scientists at London Natural History Museum, on a long term project supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation London, retracing the steps of Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886-1978), a key British ecologist, resulting in a major solo exhibition at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography Amsterdam, then touring in the United Kingdom, with an accompanying publication ‘Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives’, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Best Photography Book 2018 and winner of the Best Dutch book design.
In summer 2023 she was invited by Passage Air residency to explore the Dübener Heide region in Germany with its consequent transformation processes due to former coal mining and environmental change.
In the summer and autumn 2024-25 she returned by the invitation of Passage Air and the Kobra group to study the landscape of Hofgestüt Bleesern, in Saxony-Anhalt, the oldest European stud farm built in 1676, resulting in an exhibition in 2025.

A graduate from the Royal College of Art, her photographs and films have been widely exhibited. Among them at the Wellcome Collection; a major one person exhibition at Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; De Pont Museum, Tilburg; The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; The Royal academy Summer show; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Impression gallery, Bradford; Maryland Art Space, Baltimore; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia; The Collection and Usher Gallery, Lincoln; National Media Museum, Bradford; Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Nichido Contemporary Arts, Tokyo; Palais de Tokyo, Paris. 

Works are held in several private and public collections amongst them Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography Amsterdam, The Scottish National Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, The Collection and Usher Gallery, The Citigroup Private Bank, Vital Art and The Wilson Center for Photography. 

She has published three monographs: L’espace temps-Time in Space (2003), Between Dog and Wolf (2006) and Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives
published to accompany the exhibition at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (2017) and recipient of the Kraszna Krausz book award 2018.
She has contributed to numerous Photography and Visual Arts journals: Amongst them The New York Times TMagazine, FT Week-end Magazine, The Guardian, Studies in Photography (SSHoP), Source, Camera Austria, Exit and Portfolio Catalogue.