Vessel of Honour | Patricia Bowman Kingsley
"Beauty from Ash embodies my journey from trauma to well-being through stages of recollection, reduction, rebirthing, and renewal. This work joins deconstructed history into reconstructed abstract circular forms having no dominant top or bottom, or defined beginning or end. Within the rectilinear works, circles represent pockets of life within the whole or collective groupings of the shared parts of life seasons.
I divested myself of the power within collected objects, minerals, vegetation, stories, and documents using fire and a bench grinder. Powerful history reduced to ash, and ground archival dust of varying chroma. This ash dust was coaxed to rest upon varying polymers, encaustic mediums, or fixatives, joined with powdered pigments, and gold leaf, gifted by a neighbour upon her death.
Ash cleansed and neutralized the pain of my history as I searched for the beauty of a life well lived amidst the shred and burn of trauma. The journey through ash -- to beauty is about personally, and prophetically, establishing these evidentiary testaments of living through loss. Making beauty out of dust, within the continuous circle of shared human existence."
Instagram: @pattykingsley
