ARTIST STATEMENT

Barbara Cole comments, “Over the past thirty years, I have been operating as a painter but employing traditional photographic tools.” Indeed, Cole’s photography consciously parallels itself to painting; resembling the fluidity of painterly brush strokes, her camera and means of production work as the agents that capture tonal range and figurative abstraction. Similar in nature to a painter’s treatment of their medium, Cole’s methodology transforms figures by its demand for skilled craftsmanship and constructed narrative to achieve the artist’s passionate interpretation of the form under light and shadow.

Cole began her career as a model and later worked as a Fashion writer; it was during fashion shoots, that photographers would suggest Cole look through their lens and ask for her opinion, prompting Cole’s interest in photography. In her artwork, Barbara Cole embarks on a variety of series that explore her painterly and tactile relationship to photography. Inspired by an episode in her life where much of her time was spent swimming, the element of water took a central role in her early work. Through shooting underwater, Cole created the aesthetic of malleable fluidity, beginning to use the element as another lens between the camera and the subject, re-envisioning space while elevating a degree of fantasy to her work.

Cole creates the series Shadow Dancing, after perfecting the craft of the “wet-collodion tintype.” The wet-collodion technique is a photographic negative process, in which light-sensitive silver compounds are held in a collodion coating on a glass support, a prevalent trend in photography of the late 19th century.

“The women in these images are archetypal figures reflecting the ability of the human spirit to synthesize experience and triumph over adversity. They are testaments to the power of bravely embracing one’s shadow.”