Conversations with Nature: Tara Cronin: Winds

Conversations with Nature: Tara Cronin: Winds by Aline SmithsonApril 20, 2021

©Tara Cronin, Air

Artist Tara Cronin has a practice that considers the natural world from all perspectives – interior and spiritual connections and the physical sensations of being on the earth. Her work combines photographic images with her unique meditative language that uses ink and her own blood to create personal expressions of time and place. Her series, Winds, uses that language to examine the remarkable connections of harmony within small and large connections to our existence.

Tara Anne Cronin is an artist and writer focusing on photography, works on paper, installation and sound, and book-arts. She received a BA in Writing from New School University, an MFA from the International Center of Photography (ICP)/Bard Program, and has Twice-earned the ICP Director’s Fellowship Award. Having exhibited throughout New York City, North America and internationally, recent exhibitions include a group show at Foley Gallery in New York, NY with PDN Magazine in 2016, a group show at the Kahilu Theatre in Waimea, HI, in 2018, and a group show of the 2019 CENTER Award Winners at Pictura Gallery in 2020. Tara recently was awarded the Annual FRESH Exhibition with KlompChing Gallery in DUMBO, NY. She also was awarded 2nd Place for the Director’s Choice Award 2019 with CENTER at Santa Fe.

Tara and her partner Ed took on the oldest Organically Certified Kona coffee farm in 2015 to apply their agricultural technology and she is now a coffee roaster and farmer as well. She sits on the board of directors of the Society for Kona’s Education and Art and has helped teach with International Center of Photography, Donkey Mill Art Center on Big Island, HI, and also is a member of Donkey Mill’s Exhibitions Committee.

Tara works primarily on the Big Island in Hawai’i in the United States. She has gallery representation with Dab Art in the Los Angeles area in California. IG @wakingbastet

©Tara Cronin, Feather

Winds

I tend toward making work about the inner worlds that enrich and even overtake many of our daily lives. Having experiences that have shaped me in such a way that I cannot ignore the majesty of our human experience and the natural world surrounding us, I am fascinated by the clash and contrast between our personal “inside” views through which we walk through the “outer” world that is our daily experience.

It fascinates me because it is not a clash at all but in fact quite a beautifully orchestrated symbiosis. This contrast preoccupies me — the seeming contrast between the world of the anatomical, and that of the emotional/spiritual/psychological – the world of our everyday path. For me this is not a contrast at all, but two parts of a whole in harmony, on a micro and macro level, connecting further out into the universe we so far as I know.

The mind and body will never be separate. Beneath our consciousness we are so much and yet something nearly invisible – Beneath our Humanity, our Stories, we are Blood, Sinew, Synapse, Bone, and vice versa.

In traversing the path I’ve come to find a fascination and appreciation for the things, the roots and origins of what brings us together rather than divides us; our humanity and those things with which we tend to define it. One of those items I love to explore is the idea of Language. Language, at root is a form of communication, that can be found in many forms. There are verbal and non-verbal languages, languages of history, there are chemical languages within our bodies and a form of communication we still cannot put our finger on but as of today we call it dark energy, and this ties together/communicates, apparently, the entirety of our cosmos.

It is through these concepts of which I am in awe that I try to also bring to light how connected to all of it our heart is, and this is incredibly important to explore. Trying to stimulate the senses is important to me as well tactility.