About the Artist
Chris Rayn is a contemporary artist investigating perception, impermanence and fragility of being through a lens-based process. Spanning four major cycles of work developed over two decades, his practice explores how identity, reality and meaning are formed through individual experience by creating images that unsettle habitual ways of seeing.
Rather than through isolated projects, the work evolves through interconnected bodies of work rooted in sustained observation over many years, each contributing to an ongoing exploration of how meaning emerges, shifts, and dissolves through perception.
Current Work
The most recent cycle of work, Studies in Lightness, uses abstracted botanical forms as its site of inquiry. Blossoms, flower fields and fall foliage are used not as representational subjects, but as a perceptual arena in which questions of presence, identity, memory, and change can be experienced through sustained looking. For a deeper discussion of the ideas and themes that inform the work, please read the Artist Statement.
Practice Development
The current cycle did not emerge as an isolated body of work, but is the result of a continuous practice spanning more than twenty years, divided into four cycles which each have their own formal expression, but share the same inquiry into instability of being, and seeing. The concerns that shape the current work evolved gradually through these earlier bodies of work, each extending, refining, and reconfiguring questions carried forward from the last.
Cycle IV: Studies in Lightness
States of Spring (2023-)
States of Fall (2022-)
Waterworlds (2021-)
Tiny Trees (2023-)
Cycle III: Nature of Reality
The Cloud Mind (2025-)
Electric Shadows (2016-18)
Floating World (2012-14)
Shadows of our Selves (2012-16)
Cycle II: The Existential Self
Whisper to Heaven (2012-19)
Veiled Whispers (2020-22)
Masked Identities (2020-22)
Brand New Self (2021-24)
Cycle I: The Big Picture
Unknown Hero (2015-19)
Age of Uncertainty (2020-22)
Fragments (2007-15)
Explore the full body of work by Chris Rayn on his official artist website chrisrayn.com