Featured Artist Lorraine Reynolds The Glimmering Prize

The Glimmering Prize is a bounty of heartfelt treasures made from discarded trinkets and everyday items. Mixed media collage artist, Lorraine Reynolds, transforms the mundane into mystical, the everyday into extraordinary. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Lorraine is a costume and technical designer by trade. A Vermont transplant for almost 18 years, she takes found objects, such as broken dolls, rusty tins and discarded books and brings forth their unspoken stories, weaving tales of lost love, childhood memories and remembrance into each piece.

She is a self proclaimed junk collector, treasure hunter and junkyard gypsy. You can find her meandering about early on a summer’s morning with her two boys, Henry, 14 and Jack, 7; scouting flea markets and yard sales looking for that embellishments for one of her pieces. It’s the process of collecting, finding and discovering the components that inspires her to make her art. But, music and history are her two muses. She cannot create without her “soundtrack to art.” Playing her music in the studio; the lilting notes from her favorite movie scores carry her to a creative space that has no walls. Often, she will get stuck on a song and play it over and over again until the piece is finished and the bittersweet emotion is caught within her mixed media collages.
She loves to travel about the state of Vermont, admiring old mill towns and Main Streets: places off the beaten path that are permeated with mysteries, secrets and perhaps a ghost story or two. It is the mixing of the past lives with the present in the physical form of art as an offering to remembrance that is what she calls “the Church of the Ordinary.”

Her work has been shown throughout the state of Vermont, as well as in New York City. She is a proud member of the International Society of Alter Book Arts, the Vermont Book Arts Guild and ZNE. She has recently been published in Somerset Studio, the art of mixed media and paper, July/August edition, where two of her assemblage pieces were featured in this “sisterhood” edition.

You can find out more about her work at her blog: http://glimmeringprize.blogspot.com/

Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Lorraine-Reynolds-Glimmering-Prize/55961283750

Etsy shoppe: http://www.glimmeringprize.etsy.com/