Abundance and Scarcity

Jennifer Clark
Melanie Earle
Shauna Earle
Cindy Norton
Steven White
Carol Binns Wood

November 2018

The Grey Highlands Artists Collective (GHAC) is an artistic group based out of Flesherton, ON. Here GHAC now presents its eighth collaborative exhibit. GHAC principals, Melanie Earle, Carol Binns Wood, and Shauna Earle, have invited Steven White, Jennifer Clark and Cindy Norton to join them in examining a timely and deeply personal theme, Abundance & Scarcity.

From a large, conceptual, symbiotic-relation, spiral staircase, to the beauty and fragility of a single seed, the artists literally and figuratively examine the themes on both a macro and micro scale. By also using ‘found treasures’ and repurposed materials, the artists look to actually reduce their artistic footprints while imagining new artworks through scarcity itself.

The plight of the Arctic, as affected by humans, is doubly-explored through Shauna Earle’s encaustic works, focusing on the delicate balance of the Arctic ecosystem, while Melanie Earle looks at the ‘polarity’ of created landscapes and the wild, untamed world through visualizing the sad reality of the melting icepack and the polar bear.

Cindy Norton’s mixed media kinetic structures provide a visual commentary on environmental degradation and endangered species, while giving new life to discarded items and found “treasures”. Jennifer Clark’s depictions of the
elemental world seeks to explore the forces of growth and contradiction. “What began as seed forms became, in the end, the expression of climate change through the elements of fire and water during this time of massive forest fires and hurricanes.”

Personal perception inspires both Carol Binns Wood mixed-media sculpture and Steven White’s abstract form he created for this exhibit. Binns Wood uses intimate, personal objects to comment on the wealth of the planet and the inequity of its shared resources. White, meanwhile, explores a larger, shared encounter through the random, interactive nature of his piece, which acts as a metaphor for the waves of abundance or scarcity that we all experience.

The artists’ works in this exhibition reflect on polarizing themes that, in these times, often divide us physically and politically. Collectively, the works also entreat us to come together; inviting us to consider our place in the balance of abundance and scarcity, as well as the ensuing disruption of that balance caused by the footprint of most dominant
species on the planet.