Burnt Offerings Art Exhibition

What do you get when two artists are given free rein with their pyromaniac tendencies? You get Burnt Offerings.

Burnt Offerings brings together two artists whose practices share a remarkable common thread: both use intense, deliberate heat to transform their materials, and both have embraced that fire will always have the final word.

Karena works with recycled cedar boards, their knots and scars already carrying a previous life before she begins. She paints, and then she burns, feeding each piece to flame until the acrylic blisters. The result is bold, large-scale work that leans into landscape without prescribing it. (www.karenadepont.com)

Alysn works with metal such as stainless steel, copper, brass, and bronze using a process called flame painting to draw out colours inherent in the materials themselves. Works are shaped into flowing, textured forms which may be found placed over silver-gilded canvases or allowed to hang freely, all casting shifting shadows as daylight moves around them. The works explore the fragile structures that hold us physically, emotionally and collectively. (www.alysnmidgelowmarsden.com)

Where Karena's work is rooted and tactile, Alysn's is atmospheric, evoking the shimmer of light on water, a sense of depth, movement, and time layered beneath a surface.

The two practices could hardly look more different. Yet side by side they are unexpectedly, compellingly complete. You will encounter the dark and the luminous, the earthbound and the weightless, the charred and the iridescent.

Burnt Offerings invites you to witness transformation and to consider what becomes possible when an artist is willing to let go of what they made, and trust what the fire makes instead.