Abigail Reynolds

Abigail Reynolds’s fascination with books and photographs printed in them is longstanding. She studied English literature at Oxford University before degrees at Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths. The artist’s practice regularly repurposes photographs that she excavates from the pages of books. Often recognisable and uncannily familiar, these images have been widely circulated and shared via the mass printing process. 

Whether working in sculpture, film or an event, Reynolds’ practice is essentially collage. The Universal Now is an ongoing body of work which is created by splicing together photographs that depict the same place, taken from the same angle by different photographers often decades apart. The artist carefully and precisely cuts and folds the images onto themselves so that they create one new surface with both photographs being visible in their entirety and at once. This simultaneity is key to reading the work, Reynolds does not privilege one photograph, or one moment over another; both are present in the moment of looking.  In so doing the artist explores photography’s relationship to time and its ability to collapse the past in the present. 

“The photograph is usually seen as a simplified option for reproducing time, based on the idea that the photo fixes a point in time, which is already in the past when it is taken. In this case time is defined as a chronological continuum, from which the photograph extracts one single moment and thus points back into the past. Reynolds’ photographic works, in contrast, make clear a temporality which depends less on a linear sequence than on simultaneity. In dissolving the evoked space in a multi-perspectival way by slicing up the paper, Reynolds combines fragments of space from different temporal origins. ….Reynolds’ works grant the recipient a way of viewing photography that seems to completely reverse its customary definition: here the gaze into an image can slide along various perspectives through heterogeneous spaces and times.”

 

- Walter Moser, Fragments and Interfaces, Eikon Magazine

Like an archaeologist the artist is interested in the passing of time, unearthing images she resurrects and transfers them to a new moment and context, one that is open to more complex readings and significance. Martin Clark, Director Camden Arts Centre and previously Director Tate St Ives, comments:

In 2020 Reynolds was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for visual art and her work was purchased by the Arts Council Collection. In March 2016 she was awarded the BMW Art Journey prize at Art Basel, to travel to lost libraries along the Silk Road. Her book 'Lost Libraries' documenting this journey was published by Hatje Cantz in 2018.

Abigail Reynolds' work is owned by the Arts Council Collection, London, the Government Art Collection, London, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale, the New York Public Library, New York and numerous private collections.

Public institutions which have exhibited Reynolds’ work include Tate, St Ives, The Harris Museum Preston, PEER UK, London, Whitechapel Gallery London, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany and more.