The Reflecting Pool
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Working towards a new body of work to be exhibited late 2026, the reflecting pool continues my preoccupation with ways of seeing and perceiving. Based around the black pool under cover of trees found on farms and bush rivers all over New Zealand, the stillness of the bottomless void with tiny suggestions of what is lurking below, the reflecting pool is a chance to consider our own mysterious thoughts, behaviours and suppositions. Reflecting light, heat and sound, the pool shows us a likeness or counterpart, allowing us to bend our thoughts inward.
More to come... |
Acrylic on canvas, 1000 x 1000 mm
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BotanicalsPhantom Vision, Solo show - February 2025" phantom vision, is a condition where visual hallucinations occur as a result of damage along the visual pathway.
People experiencing Charles Bonnet Syndrome have intact cognition, insight that the visual hallucinations are not real, and absence of other psychological conditions". *Pang L. Hallucinations Experienced by Visually Impaired: Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Optom Vis Sci. 2016;93(12):1466-1478. In March 2020, my sister began to lose her sight as a result of illness and she described to me what she was seeing. Her "hallucinations" were full of colour and blazing forms. We were staying in Wanaka at the time and I would go for long walks each day along the Clutha river, thinking about her and what she had described. I saw many thriving immigrant plant species whose colours seems more lurid to me than they should, strangely out of place, yet totally at home. As Autumn turned to Winter that year, I thought more deeply about the physical act of looking. Do we all see the things in the same way? What if we reduce the human scale and make ourselves smaller? What if we reduce our ego and look at nature from the viewpoint of a common insect? Would that change how we perceive an object? I painted these images from memory, not wanting to be truly representational, but to make an image that would reveal our physical vulnerability. The flower is a metaphor for that vulnerability, subject to the elements and all too brief in blooming. |
Acrylic on canvas, 500 x 600mm
Acrylic on Canvas, 600 x 800mm
Acrylic on canvas, 580 x 410mm
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Acrylic on canvas, 400 x 400 mm
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Acrylic on linen. 60 x 90 cm
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Acrylic on Canvas. 600 x 900 mm
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Acrylic on canvas, 500 x 600 mm
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Meteorology
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Air, water and dust are all that is required to make cloud - a recipe of sorts but clouds confound this simple description with their heavenly status . The observation of clouds is an ancient habit inspiring poets, artists and musicians for millennia. Science inevitably sought to capture their elusiveness. In 1802, Howard Luke made to classify clouds along a the Linnean system with Bi-nomal latin names. Yet in seeking to name them along enlightenment ideals, he could not escape their poetry and beauty.
"My talk this evening concerns itself with what may strike some as an uncharacteristically impractical subject: it is concerned with the modification of clouds. Since the increased attention which has been given to meteorology, the studies of various appearances of water suspended in the atmosphere has become an interesting and even necessary branch of that pursuit. If clouds were the mere result of condensation of vapour in the masses of the atmosphere which they occupy, if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone, then indeed might the study be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows...." "On the Modification of Clouds", Howard, Luke, 1802. Speech to the Askesian Society, London. |
Acrylic on Canvas, 600 x 600 mm
Acrylic on canvas, 900 x 900 mm
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Copyright of Geraldinestevensart - images, text and concept belong to Geraldine Stevens and may not be reproduced in any form without her permission - 2026