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What happens when two artists are given free rein with their fire-lighting tendencies?
The result is Burnt Offerings, a new exhibition at the Mangawhai Artists Gallery.
Opening on September 11, the Burnt Offerings exhibition brings together artists Karena de Pont and Alysn Midgelow-Marsden, whose art shares a common thread: both artists 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 works on them. She paints, then burns, feeding each piece to flame until the acrylic blisters, the pigment shifts and the wood chars and opens to reveal its grain anew.
The result is bold, large-scale work that leans into landscape without prescribing it: deep blacks, earthy reds and ochres, pale ghost-whites informed by years of roads well-travelled and the passing glimpses of horizon, sky and grasses seen from a moving perspective.
“At first, I charred the wood and then started painting. Then I realised I was painting over all over the wonderful, charred bits. So now I paint first and char the wood second, so both the paint and the wood burn together.
“I refer to my work as ‘painting with fire’ as I found how, with the application of heat, not only the texture but also the colours and hues of the paint change and shift,” Karena says.
Alysn works with metals like stainless steel, copper, brass and bronze using a process called flame painting to draw out colours already inherent in the materials themselves.
This process creates petrol hues in heated steel, rainbows that bloom across copper and bronze, and subtle pale greens and umbers in brass. These colours are not applied but revealed through changes in the metal caused by heat.
Works are shaped into flowing, textured forms that may be placed over silver-gilded canvases or allowed to hang freely, casting shifting shadows as daylight moves around them. The works explore the fragile structures that hold us physically, emotionally and collectively.
“When I began to investigate using metal and fabric woven from fine metal wires, I found that the colours of different metal changed with heat. I have spent several years manipulating and stitching metal, using it as a fabric,” Alysn says.
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 and compellingly complete: the dark and the luminous, the earthbound and the weightless, the charred and the iridescent.
Burnt Offerings is a witness to transformation. It shows what is possible when an artist is willing to let go of what they created and trust what fire makes instead.
Mangawhai Artists Gallery, 45 Moir Street, Mangawhai, is open daily from 10am to 3pm (and from 9am on Saturdays). Burnt Offerings opens at 6pm on Friday, September 11 and runs to September 24.
The Gallery is closed for exhibition changeover during the day on September 11.
