The Elegance of the Maverick
Simone Witney

(extract of text from the catalogue to accompany the exhibition DARK AGES, Bermondsey Project Space, London, 2019)

In the middle of the journey of life, I came to myself within a dark wood” (Dante). Waking in the night I sometimes wonder if Kirsten Reynolds is in a wood somewhere or by a lake. Alone, dressed in black, melting into the shadows, she is setting up her long-exposure camera, putting her coloured lights to hand, sensitising herself to the energies, sounds and mysterious ambience of the place. Forget tree hugging and dancing with elves. What happens on such nights is physical philosophy.

 

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. They look like an extraordinary natural event: the aurora borealis, or freak electrical activity.