Kirsten Reynolds is a British artist based in St Leonards-on-Sea working in painting, photography, print and drawing. Her background spans a wide range of work in diverse media with a special interest in the relationship between the perception of sound and colour. Her work is intuitive in nature and draws on our deep relationship with the environment and connection with natural forces.

Since 2005 Reynolds has created and shown installation works as part of Power Plant a sound and light art experience presented in botanical gardens around the world. The project was a key sell-out event at international art festivals including the Hong Kong Arts Festival, China in 2011 and the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand in 2017.

Whilst her focus has shifted to painting, a previous series of light-drawing photographs made directly in nature at night continue to inform the work. These photographs, with Reynolds as the invisible figure in the landscape, play with light and dark and our innate sense of apprehension regarding the unseen or unknown. The subsequent richly-coloured paintings display the visceral energy and rhythm of their making and present intense psychological spaces for reflection.

‘The photographs she takes record her explorations of place and time through drawing. She weaves skeins of light before the lens, sometimes white, sometimes coloured. Her trajectory leaves traces whose shapes shift from transparent, through opaque, to sinuous, web-fine lines with the tensile strength of steel.  Sometimes the landscape is barely discernible, just a dense tactile space, at other times the forms drift over recognisable terrain like mist that is impossibly articulated, or a bolt of fine silk, each fold of which is impossibly crystalline, or a transparent titanium sculpture.

Reynolds conveys in paint what is happening in the photographs: a sense of process in which the outcome is not defined beforehand. Some are like the essence of landscape, where form is minimal. Others though, look like a further stage of dissolution.  They don’t express an aggressive sense of destruction, but are gorgeously, sensually molten and cataclysmic with shreds of landscape whose shape eludes you on close examination.’

Extract from:
The Elegance of the Maverick.
Simone Witney, 2017

Born: Macclesfield, UK, 1968 Education: Kingston Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Fine Art Sculpture,1987–90

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2022    Surface Tensions, Red Door Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
2018    Dark Ages, Bermondsey Project Space, London, UK
2017    The Illusion of Democracy, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK
2016    The Spirit of Time: In the Footsteps of Schwitters, Maerz Contemporary, Molde, Norway             
2015    Suspension of Disbelief, The Blackhead Gallery, Robertsbridge, UK
2014    On the Rocks, Photospace Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
2013    Multiplied, Christies, London, 2013
2011    Power Plant and Beyond, Gallery B15, Copenhagen, Denmark

Selected Group Exhibitions

2024    Resonance Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark
2021    Winter Show, Bermondsey Project Space, London, UK
2020    Mars and Beyond, The Bargehouse, London, UK
2019    Arboretum, Lucy Bell Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK
2017    AXIS LONDON MILANO, Venti & Associati, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy
2013    Sublimate, Sublime, Subliminal, The Lloyds Club, London, UK
2003    Sonic Boom, (Project Dark), Hayward Gallery, London, UK

Selected Large-scale Sound and Light Events

2019    Enchanted, Audley End House, English Heritage, Audley End, UK
2017    Power Plant, Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand
2013    Power Plant, New Zealand Festival, Wellington, New Zealand
2011    Power Plant, Hong Kong International Festival, Hong Kong, China
2009    Power Plant, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh International Festival, UK
2008    Power Plant, European Capital of Culture ’08, Liverpool, UK

Selected Press INTERNATIONAL TIMES
Kirsten Reynolds: The Elegance of the Maverick by Simone Witney
https://internationaltimes.it/kirsten-reynolds-the-elegance-of-the-maverick/