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Artist: Louise Reynolds

“Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. / Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning.”

Louise Reynolds’ solo exhibition with Unit delves into the complexities of current affairs. By focusing on the fleeting nature of the news and the imbalanced ways in which information is disseminated, the artist hopes to undo the impermanence of news cycles that we consume daily. The exhibition’s title, Red Sky at Morning, is drawn from an ancient rhyme that signifies the impending threat of an ominous weather event for shepherds working in fields. For Reynolds, the idiom sums up the idea of dark times both present and future. The implied promise of “shepherd’s delight” still lingers, however, and is encapsulated in a series of more light-hearted works that remind viewers of the simple joys of shared experience.

Her series of drawings is therefore characterised by a “high/low” perspective, combining seemingly contrasting narratives to question the hierarchy of news stories. Through a unique form of magical realism, Reynolds attempts to navigate the information overload from contemporary media outlets and challenges the narratives that influence our view of the world. Ultimately, Red Sky at Morning offers no resolutions but aims instead to use visual culture as a way of processing the variety of information we are faced with every day.

Reynolds began making work concerned with the news in her early career. As time progressed, however, her subject matter became more transformative and literal. Most of her work is inspired by words and phrases peppered throughout the headlines of various media outlets. Motivated by her intuitive reactions to headlines, the artist is most captivated by turns of phrase that are more tongue and cheek or simply jarring. In this sense, her works subtly criticise the media players that hold the weightiest influence over society’s thinking. Reynolds draws from outlets such as the BBC and Guardian, but also looks to X (formerly Twitter), the Daily Mail and The Sun in order to create the “high/low” perspective that typify her artworks that simultaneously address socio-political issues and tabloid gossip. Considering the misguided overlap between celebrity gossip and genuine global issues in the news, these artworks place brutal realities next to banal stories to question how information is fed to the public by the world’s most powerful media companies.

Inspired by Victorian artists such as Henry Fuseli and William Blake, Reynolds blends representation with the surreal to produce a visual language that is both otherworldly and urgent. In the Dreamhouse depicts the interior of a pink doll’s house set in a dystopian landscape. The grain of the wood panel, Reynolds’ material of choice, is visible underneath the image, creating a swirling skyscape reflective of the “shepherd’s warning”. Stirred by the media proliferation of Barbie movie advertising alongside the photos circulating of classified documents found in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, the drawing brings together two news stories that seemingly belong to different worlds. On close study, viewers notice boxes of documents falling open inside the illuminated house as loose papers whirl around its interior. Barbie’s dreamhouse and the former president’s White House merge as the artist examines the imbalance of reporting in the media.

The themes of the exhibition culminate in Metamorphoses, a drawing in which Reynolds suggests the general threat of global conflict. Influenced by countless news articles, the artist attempts to combine numerous reports into a single image. Inspired by mythology in which Gods transform humans into plants, such as Narcissus and Hyacinth, Reynolds uses the image of tulips in full bloom. The tulips are trimmed unnecessarily, presenting viewers with a memento mori and reflecting the conflicts that needlessly take lives every day. A pair of garden shears appear from the far right of the picture, recalling the scissors held by the fates in Greek mythology, seemingly cutting the thread of humanity’s collective fate. Reynolds also includes a series of etchings alongside these large-scale drawings. The etchings relate to the history of print, considering the ways in which news was originally disseminated before a time of intense over-saturation in the media.

The artworks featured in Red Sky at Morning are not easily readable, reflecting the ways in which the media can often cloud society’s judgement. This illegibility mirrors how many of us understand the world through the filter of news outlets that assert a specific angle or agenda. Even if difficult to read now, Reynolds hopes that these artworks will have lasting significance, continuing to be relevant in future news cycles and open to reinterpretation as times change. In Red Sky at Morning, Reynolds does not shy away from challenging subject matter as her artworks become ways to slow down and consider what truly matters.