Available Work by Shary Bartlett

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Is a call to speak out about environmental and human concerns. One concern referenced by the artist’s use of beeswax in this exhibition is the steep decline in the Earth’s bee colonies over the last two decades, due to environmental change and the use of pesticides.

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Tangled Forest, playfully depicts a haunting forest, while in actuality it is a hand-altered photograph of winter Hydrangea skeleton flower behind a frost-encrusted window. The photo’s apparent silhouettes of trees mimic the forms and designs found in the flowers themselves, and indeed in its microscopic cellular make-up. This depiction of winter recalls the obdurate memory of summer.

The materiality of this Encaustic photograph underlines a further connection: between the images of trees and the natural tree resin in encaustic medium.

This work takes its name from the Dylan Thomas poem, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” that speaks of time, love and life. Described as a “powerful hymn to the green world,” the poem references the flower’s stem as a green fuse that sparks an explosion of energy, life and beauty, which ends inevitably in demise. The poem and this painting both illustrate the metamorphic cycle of life and death, noting how creation and destruction are part of the same recurrent process - both for humans and for nature. 

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As humans, we often experience ourselves at “the centre of our own universe“ - forgetting our existence is but a tiny, brief moment in the history of the Earth and the cosmos. “Whorl,” details an emerging form that, like cells and the orbiting universe, evolve cyclically, within or out of our control?