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Helen Redman

When we take the time to truly see, to be aware and focused, the power, potential, beauty and tragedy of life meets our gaze with full force!

Aging Into Full Creativity

Sometimes it is only the accumulation of a whole life that reveals the fabric of our humanity. As I look back and move forward, digitally weaving the threads of my art, I see a colorful tapestry of creative empowerment.

Having explored both the archetype and reality of pregnancy, motherhood and elderhood, I hope to become a “cyber-crone” beyond my lifetime, providing others a close-up look at how creating art over six decades has been a personal, political and transformational journey. The crone feels time as layered, multifaceted, and often contradictory, similar to how one experiences cyberspace. Blending the crone’s vision of a simultaneous past and present with the artist’s ability to communicate through visual form, I offer this website so that others may sense the art in their own lives, their own bodies, and their own souls.

Recent Work

“In Helen Redman’s work we experience something quite extraordinary…It is a kind of transparentizing vision that allows us to see the not normally seen, and to experience the not normally known… a deep look into the nature of being itself, something few other artists have ever been able to achieve!”

–Roland Reiss, Professor Emeritus of Art, Claremont Graduate University

Historical Work

“Redman offer[s] a visceral sense of artistic growth and new vitality… In reclaiming, through language and images, the potency of post-menopausal women, Redman continues the invaluable work of feminist artists… who have been re-envisioning female potential. Birthing the Crone: Aging into Full Creativity functions as a kind of tapestry, weaving alternative visions of beauty found in experiences lived, love shared, pain survived, wisdom earned.”  

–Debra Koppman, Artweek

“Now in her eighties with a lifetime of feminist art engagement as part of her legacy, Redman’s expansive oeuvre centers on themes of matrilineage, generational ties, and human connection.”

-Michelle Millar Fisher, curator
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
c0-author of Designing Motherhood
(MIT Press) 2021

 

Workshop
Creativity and Aging Workshop in Redman Studio

On the date that Birthing the Crone first went on-line 11/18/95, I had barely heard of a website. It was my son-in-law Kevin Frank who thought cyberspace was the place to publish my art and writings on menopause and aging. Wired promptly found it online and wrote:

“All who linger at birthingthecrone.com enter a metaphorical terrain resonating with transformation. Here visual and written works course with ethereal energies as age erodes the protective shell of hidden fears, revealing the honesty that comes with mortality…. Look and be renewed.” –Kristin Spence, Wired Magazine

The overwhelming interest from women all over the world, spurred me on to expand and respond, leading to workshops and lectures on the topic of menopause and aging (1993 to 2015). I learned that people of all ages and gender were hungry to understand more about this “taboo” subject. Opening my studio to aging into full creativity workshops, I saw that our art exchanges also imparted messages of wisdom, healing, and kinship

Story Bones
Visit our Historical site

Birthing the Crone

For many years Helen’s art has resided at birthingthecrone.com. You can still visit to see older collections, workshops focused on the heightened creativity that comes with age, previous exhibitions and ephemera …