Janice Ledgerwood is a California-based multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates ontology, the systems through which the world is named, classified, and ordered. Working across sculpture, installation, artist's books, and technology-based media, she constructs and interrogates taxonomies: of femininity, of geological time, of ecological systems, and of the boundaries between human and non-human ways of knowing.

For more than a decade, Ledgerwood has worked with the Campus Cuties, identical mid-century Marx Toys figurines differentiated only by what they wear, what they're named, and what role they're assigned. Through laser engraving, 3D printing, wax casting, and hand-coloring work, she has organized these figures into invented taxonomies: preparatory programs, award ceremonies, garment-based identities, durational performances of endurance and loss. The categories themselves are the critique, exposing how women are classified, assigned, and rewarded under systems that mistake proximity to power for power itself.

A parallel body of work has emerged from her ongoing engagement with environmental science. As a Polar STEAM Fellow and STEMSeas participant, Ledgerwood has developed Transect, an accordion-fold artist's book documenting a research voyage from Seward, Alaska to Newport, Oregon. Its two faces hold two ontologies simultaneously: one charting the deep time of tectonics, bathymetry, whale migration, ocean currents where human presence is irrelevant; the other tracing the literal human path through that same space. A proposed new work, EDGE, would extend this investigation into three dimensions, rendering Arctic topology and ocean bathymetry as layered plexiglass sculpture that makes geological and historical edges, including historical markers such as sea level change, physically present and inhabitable.

Both bodies of work ask the same question from different directions: who gets to define the categories, who and what gets left out?

Ledgerwood is a tenured Professor of Art at Clovis Community College, where she teaches digital media, animation, and comics art. Her work has been presented at the American Geophysical Union and exhibited across California and beyond. She is based in California's Central Valley and is currently developing new work at the intersection of feminist practice and environmental ontology.