Barbara Cole Falling Through Time: 20 years in the making
Cole’s project began 20 years ago, when, while traveling, the artist became enamored with the incomparable gardens of England. She was inspired by their romantic ambiance: whimsical lattices, wiry brambles, and lush roses, all overseen by classically inspired statues, impossibly weightless despite their stone medium. Capturing these whimsical spaces with her Polaroid SX-70 film, and later manipulating the malleable photographic surface to painterly effect, Cole’s documentation resulted in a series truly romantic in both history and conception. Still, Cole felt that the project was somehow incomplete; her English garden series was stored away, and soon forgotten.
Falling Through Time is a resurfacing—of not just time and place, but Cole too, who collaborates with a past self. An incomplete project comes full circle as the English garden series becomes background to the artist’s captivating underwater portraits.
The result is a visual study of time in which personal and mythical histories—refracted through the water surface—layer to create dynamic, ethereal scenes with an editorial edge. “These women do not exist in a moment in time,” says Cole, but rather alongside it, as extra-temporal travelers who float between history’s layers with confidence and mystery.
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday June 11, 2-4 pm, Artist in attendance
VIEW THE MAKING OF THIS SERIES (4 MINUTE VIDEO)