BURNT OFFERINGS
What happens when two artists hand the final decision to fire? At Mangawhai Artist Gallery this September, the answer is vivid, unexpected, and quietly unforgettable.
Burnt Offerings brings together Karena de Pont and Alysn Midgelow-Marsden in a two-person exhibition united by a remarkable shared 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, painting first before feeding each piece to flame until the acrylic blisters, pigment shifts, and the wood chars to reveal its grain anew. The result is bold, large-scale work informed by years of road travel across four countries – deep blacks, earthy reds and ochres, pale ghost-whites that lean into landscape without prescribing it. Inspired by the Japanese art of preserving wood – Yakisugi or Shon Sugi Ban – she calls her practice “painting with fire” as the application of heat not only changes texture but shifts the colours and hues of the paint.
Alysn works with metal – stainless steel, copper, brass, and bronze – using flame painting to draw out colours inherent in the materials themselves. Petrol hues bloom across heated steel, rainbows emerge in copper and bronze, and subtle pale greens and umbers in brass. These colours are not applied but revealed, the product of atomic change in the metal's structure. Shaped into flowing, textured forms placed over silver-gilded canvases or allowed to hang freely, the works cast shifting shadows as daylight moves around them.
Where Karena's work is rooted and tactile, Alysn's is atmospheric – evoking the shimmer of light on water, depth, movement, and time. Side by side, the two practices, despite their differences, are unexpectedly, compellingly complete.
Burnt Offerings runs 12-24 September at Mangawhai Artist Gallery, 45 Moir Street. Opening night Friday 11 September, 5.30-7.30pm – all welcome.