Sheri Bakes | Aurora

Sheri Bakes | Aurora
October 5 - 17, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday October 5, 2-4pm | Artist in Attendance

Reflecting Bakes' recent viewing of the Northern Lights from her Vancouver Island home, these atmospheric paintings were inspired in part by elements of the science behind the auroras; from there, Bakes aimed to reach beyond the technical rendering of this natural phenomenon to focus on the feeling and emotion that the Lights convey. Bakes’ signature evocation of movement, energy and life-force connects all her paintings.


Artist Statement:

This new body of work explores the Northern Lights from a large Vancouver Island farm. There are a couple of cougar dens in the area where I live so I tend to avoid walking outside at night and in the early morning, but I wanted to see the auroras. 

To see the Northern Lights on the farm means walking through a forested area down a long gravel driveway in complete darkness to a clearing which offers an opening to the night sky. I missed the first night of lights because I was too afraid to take the long dark walk to the clearing. The following nights I mustered the courage and carried a portable high powered industrial light and made it out to the clearing to see the incredibly vibrant colours and dynamic movement of the Northern Lights over the farm. 

Back in the studio, I wondered how I could paint the Northern Lights from the internal feeling of having seen them. In reading about how the lights are created (the sun ejecting charged particles from its upper atmosphere creating the solar wind, and then that wind slamming into the earth’s upper atmosphere), I wanted to explore the colourful movement of charged particles, solar wind and atmosphere in motion.

-Sheri Bakes, 2024

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