April art exhibit 'Pandemic Puddle Portraits' at Belknap Mill

LACONIA — The Belknap Mill will host Colleen Wilson through the month of April in the Lobby Gallery as well as virtually on the their website, www.belknapmill.org. Colleen will go LIVE via the Belknap Mill’s Facebook page on Tuesday, April 6 at 5 p.m. Viewers can tune in for a live interview with the artist.

Colleen is a native of Laconia who recently returned after almost 20 years in southern Maine. She is a cat person and a morning person who developed a habit of watching the daily sunrise on the Maine coast, often capturing images with her cell phone. The routine of greeting the sun and spending time in nature inspired her to purchase her first “real” camera (a Nikon, because of the Paul Simon song) and the two have been nearly inseparable since.

During her time in Maine Colleen won a photo contest for Down East Magazine (her first published photo) and began a project to photograph all 65 lighthouses in the state.

Upon her return to the Granite State last year, Colleen traded lighthouses for covered bridges (55 of them in New Hampshire) and has only two bridges left to photograph. While in New Hampshire, she also continues her daily routine of watching the sunrise, and is always looking on the ground for puddles (the perfect canvas for a reflection photo). Before long, she had ‘favorite’ puddles nearby some of Laconia’s most interesting buildings: the historic train station, the library, and the United Baptist Church in Lakeport.

Being back in Laconia has provided Colleen the opportunity to spend more time with her family, and she takes advantage of that by walking with her mother, longtime Laconia resident MaryAnn Wilson. After a rainstorm, their walks typically turn into puddle-hunting adventures where Colleen shoots and MaryAnn waits patiently for her daughter to move on to the next puddle, sometimes keeping a lookout for traffic when the puddles are in the road.

In December of 2020, Colleen created “Reflections of Laconia” a 2021 calendar filled with her pandemic puddle project images. The creation and promotion of that calendar led to Colleen receiving an invitation to exhibit her puddle photographs at the Belknap Mill. She is excited to present this collection of “pandemic puddle portraits” of our City on the Lakes. Three of the frames in the exhibit were crafted by Colleen’s father, local resident and woodworker Patrick Wilson.

All items in the exhibit are for sale, and additional prints or formats may be purchased by contacting Colleen, at www.colleenphaedraphotography.com or by email: colleenphaedraphoto@gmail.com.