Cloud #5

c2012 Helen Reynolds

A test of a new technique - I am really excited about the possibilities

Machine Mountain

c2012 Helen Reynolds

Square Format Camera

c2012 Helen Reynolds

Cloud #5

c2012 Helen Reynolds

Cloud #5, ink on paper

Life drawing

c2012 Helen Reynolds

- so good to be back in the life studio!

Asleep in the Clouds

Zampie, our cat, finds peace and quiet in the clouds.

Dangling Apartments

c 2012 Helen Reynolds

My Inspiro app said 'Dangling Apartments' - this is the collage.

The Tenderness of Light by Mary McCallum

The wonderful Mary McCallum wrote a stunning series of  poems, The Tenderness of Light, for the recent Translucent Landscapes exhibition that I organised. I am 'in' two of the poems - the first and the last.
I can't tell how extraordinary it feels to be the subject of a poem - and when the poetry is as good as this!

Dead Flowers

c2012 Helen Reynolds

Light reflection

A drawing made on my phone as the autumn sky darkened into night.

Clouds are piling up on my desk

Translucent Landscapes has closed, my car log shows 'de-install Translucent Landscapes, de-install lightbox, de-install Shapeshifter' - all within the last ten days. Today I had no energy to work, and all the clouds are piling up on my desk.

CLOUDlets in the Lighbox

c2012 Helen Reynolds

The little laser cut cloudlets are hanging out in the Thistle Hall Lightbox on Arthur St until Sunday

c2012 Helen Reynolds

The final composite photograph from the series of A Cloud a Day. This is an archival ink jet print, A0 size.

CLOUD on the move

c2012 Helen Reynolds

Dis-installed CLOUD from Shapeshifter yesterday and I have brought it to the Translucent Landscapes exhibition, where it joins the Cumuolous installation.

Last week of   

T R A N S L U C E N T  L A N D S C A P E S

11 artists working to one theme in a pop-up exhibition space

installations - videomedia - oils - photography - music - poetry - more

Yes, the Fringe Festival is over but we're still celebrating

Come along & bring your friends

We're at: 75 Ghuznee St beside Glover Park

OPEN 11-6 pm daily until Thursday March 22

translucent-landscapes.blogspot.co.nz

Translucent Landscapes II

c 2012 Helen Reynolds

From the installation Cumulous at the Translucent Landscapes exhibition. I have whited out the room the installation is in - hence the paper wrapped taps (they look quite cool). In the background is a little accordion fold book, A Cloud a Day. 

One week to go for   

T R A N S L U C E N T  L A N D S C A P E S

11 artists working to one theme in a pop-up exhibition space

installations - videomedia - oils - photography - music - poetry - more

Yes, the Fringe Festival is over but we're still celebrating

Come along & bring your friends

We're at: 75 Ghuznee St beside Glover Park

OPEN 11-6 pm daily until Thursday March 22

translucent-landscapes.blogspot.co.nz

Shapeshifter: CLOUD

c2012 Helen Reynolds

The CLOUD is hanging in the greenhouse at the Shapeshifter exhibition as part of the International Festival of the Arts. This is the last weekend of the exhibition, which makes a lovely family day out.

Translucent Landscapes Exhibition

c Helen Reynolds 2012

This photo is of the Cumulous installation I have up at the Translucent Landscapes exhibition. 

One week to go for   

T R A N S L U C E N T  L A N D S C A P E S

11 artists working to one theme in a pop-up exhibition space

installations - videomedia - oils - photography - music - poetry - more

Yes, the Fringe Festival is over but we're still celebrating

Come along & bring your friends

We're at: 75 Ghuznee St beside Glover Park

OPEN 11-6 pm daily until Thursday March 22

translucent-landscapes.blogspot.co.nz

Merry Xmas

c2010 Helen Reynolds

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

(no posting for a while!)

Self Portrait 3

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I have been moving studio all week, and painting the walls white. This is the first drawing I have done in a while - I have been too tired to do much and there was no space. I seem to do self portraits when I am really tired. Maybe it seems to hard to think of a subject? But it means I always look tired in my self portraits!

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Cloud of the day

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Clouds in the evening, heavy with rain

Clouds over the Warehouse

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Quite a lot of my work at the moment is stopping to look at clouds and photograph them. Very peaceful, except that I have to do things to organise the Translucent Landscapes exhibition too!

Clouds at night

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Planning where to put Clouds

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Paper Cloud

c2011 Helen Reynolds

A paper mock-up of  a cloud sculpture curls up in the beautiful warmth we have been having and the sun is now setting.

Yellow Roses

c2011 Helen Reynolds

My Worktable

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Seperating blobs II

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Seperating things

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I have been painfully seperating a large CLOUD into seperate smaller parts for laser cutting, but I have just relised this is completely the wrong way to go about it. So I will have to find a better way! The good thing about this is I coloured everything so I could be sure the surfaces were seperate, so it looks pretty.

Sukhothai villa

One from the archives - I have spent the week making important but almost invisible adjustments to digital files so there is nothing nice to look at. We stayed in this great villa in Sukhothai a few years ago.

Shapeshifter

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I am happy to say my proposal for a CLOUD scu;pture was accepted for the Shapeshifter exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum! The Dowse has been one of my favourite places for a long time.

Bodily Self

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I am working on looking at my life/self as subsystems capableof being optimised....many questions arise when you start to think of these, few answers (yet).

Corn Husk

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Clean Laundry

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Laos Flower Boquet

Clouds 2

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Translucent Landscapes

c2011 Helen Reynolds

 An exciting project coming up - I am organising a pop-up exhibition called Translucent Landscapes with a group of artists -an exhibition of installation art, music, drawings and photography. The exhibition will pop-up on March 1st . The art work moves across, through or beyond landscapes infused with light or marked by clarity. The landscapes are real (landscapes of liquids, gaseous landscapes and crystalline landscapes) or imaginary environments where the land and (semi) natural elements are ascendant.

CLOUDlet testing

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I am going thorugh the long process of converting the digital files into physical form. The CLOUD proposal was accepted to the Shapeshifter exhibition at the Dowse. There will be a large CLOUD and two of these smaller CLOUDlets and I am working this through on paper so I can get the balance and support structures right before geting the files laser cut.

Time

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Revelling in having the opportunity to do very slow, rahter non-productive drawings like this.

Airport

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I was picking Alastair up from the airport today and while I was drawing this, I finally saw the language of the lines painted on the tarmac.

During a few long meetings

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Right brain, left brain

I am working my way (slowly) through a book that is completely fascinating, The Master and his Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist on the right and left brain functions and how shifting cultural emphasises have changed society.
He writes with depth and authority, having been both a psychiatrist and an English scholar.
The trope of the right brain as 'arty' and the left being 'linear' has proved so useful that so many people cant help but use this concept even when they think it  might be scientifically dodgy.
So it is great to read this very interesting book.
Some things I have gleaned so far

•  the right hemisphere looks at wholes, not parts - looking at parts to create an idea of the whole is the job of the left hand side.
• The right side processes novel information, even if it is in a discipline the left side usually processes . The left hand side processes things it already knows about, again even if it in a discipline the right side usually processes. So the practice of seeking new, stimulating ideas/pictures/music to keep your right side firing is a great practice. It seems the right gets activated when it sees unusual semantic forms - so the practice I have, and often use with students, of generating random concepts and then trying to design these randomly generated concepts is wonderfully rigorous! (Some university colleagues have looked at me askance when I use this technique as not being theoretically rigorous enough). I use the Inspiro app to generate images like the one above, not so much for the images themselves but to get me working in the right mode again after a break.
• The right makes connections across distantly related information. From my studies in complexity, I know that connecting distantly related information is more likely to produce novel concepts.
• Efforts of will to produce something means attention is focused and narrowed by this effort, which reduces  right activity - whereas relaxing means broadening attention and thus engaging the right brain again.
• Most neurons become fatigued after working for a while,but the noradrenergic right brain neurons stimulated by novel experience DON'T get fatigued! Isn't that fabulous? The right is also able to use a larger working memory, holding more information together while working on processing. 

Some choice quotes:
"Goethe...warned against the tendency immediately to reduce observation to conception, thus losing the power of the object in all it's newness to help us break out of the otherwise unbreachable defences of our conceptual systems. He wrote that the student of nature 'should form to himself a method in accordance with observation, but he should be careful not to reduce observation to a mere concept, to substitute words for this concept, and to proceed to treat these words as if they were objects. '
P373
"...we cannot rid ourselves of the value of beauty by a decision in theory [...] Nonetheless beauty has been effectively airbrushed out of the story of art, like a public figure that has fallen from favour in a brutal regime. Beauty is rarely mentioned in contemporary art critiques: in a reflection of the left hemisphere's values, a work is now conventionally praised as 'strong' or 'challenging', in the rhetoric of power, the only rhetoric in all our relations with the world and with one another that we are now permitted. "
P443

Cumulis humilis symbol

The symbold for those little fluffy clouds that everyone likes, cumulis humilis (CL1)

Mature Cumulonimbus

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Book Block

c2011 Helen Reynolds

I have been way too slow about finishing these Planet Books off. They are a nightmare to make.

Robot in the landscape

c2011 Helen Reynolds

Museum of the City and Sea

c2011 Helen Reynolds