THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

Visual artist Karen Lamond exhibits her latest photo series celebrating the naked female form at Fire Station Creative this August.

Beginning her career in the music industry, Karen Lamond first worked as a photographer, then music video director for artists like Garbage, Seal, Lamb, Dazed and Confused and MJ Cole. This brought her into commercials, where she has worked on campaigns for De Beers, ECover and Vera Wang.

While directing these projects, Karen continued to develop her fine art photography through a postgraduate course at Central St Martins, while also extending her skills into drama and documentary filmmaking. In 2020 she directed the award-winning Consumed for the Scottish Film Talent Network Scottish Shorts.

Since then, she has worked on fine art exhibitions including And If Not Now When, an interactive sound and film installation at The Museum of Scotland in 2021. Besides her film and sound installations at Wimbledon Tennis Museum in 2022 and Fringe by the Sea in 2024, Lamond also exhibited her first photo series Rubbish at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh last year.

Her latest exhibition draws on her experience as director — knowing how to compose shots of the female body in atmospheric light. Inspired by the evocative American photographers Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, The Butterfly Effect uses muted tones to display the delicate beauty in such vulnerable portraiture. Like the title hints, each snap of the lens allows Lamond “to capture the tiny fragments of fleeting intimacy and the bigger, unexpected resonances of these moments.”

By placing the female form alongside pieces of the natural world, Lamond highlights the strength to be found in that which is both delicate and passing. “It takes a second to capture these transient, unselfconscious, liberating moments of youth, beauty and form,” Lamond states. As a whole, the series conveys the experience of “a young woman taking flight, free of judgement, with the power to evoke unknown consequences in an ephemeral world.”

The Butterfly Effect will be open to the public on Friday the 8th of August until Sunday the 31st of August.

ENTRY IS FREE.