My work explores an inner wilderness by way of an outer one. I believe the natural world is not only an inherent part of us as human beings (and we of it), but that it is the original, exquisitely sensitive mirror in which we find our own inner terrain and wildness reflected. My work has always been an act of reverence for the natural world. There is an element of science in it, in the desire to study and observe. But there is an element of spirit, too, in the continual reaching for something just beyond the visible.
These images come as often from within as without, informed as significantly by emotional texture and imagination as observation. This is particularly true since becoming a mother—a primal event that has acquainted me with the processes (both physical and metaphorical) of germination, gestation, birth, and revelation. As I gaze at the world through this new lens, with a tiny hand clasped in my larger one, I find moments of the purest joy sneak up on me in a way they never have before, like new constellations among previously familiar stars. I find a sense of possibility suffuses our everyday lives, as beautiful and honest as the vision of a double rainbow above the vast plains of my creative life to date.
I am interested in elemental experiences that possess this added, dream-like resonance, like a vision of tiny embryonic mysteries, or the ethereal glow of a nameless light in a white landscape. These are the times when the veil feels thin, when an omnipresent but unnoticed magic moves beneath the surface of the ordinary. In my work, I aim to weave this need for understanding into a broader and equally honest experience of imagination.
Robin Cole