The alchemy of light at Kenise Barnes Fine Art

‘Convert Light Energy” opened at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent on Saturday, April 26, pairing Julia Whitney Barnes’ hand-painted cyanotypes with Sarah Morejohn’s organic drawings. The show is a conversation between these two artists’ investigations of nature’s slow, secret work — a meditation on time, decay and beauty.

Barnes works with a cyanotype process, a camera-less photographic printing process invented in 1842 by scientist and astronomer, Sir John Hirschel, which produces a cyan-blue print when a chemically-coated surface is exposed to sunlight. Using weeds and flowers harvested from her own garden and nearby locations, Barnes exposes their silhouettes on photosensitive cotton paper before meticulously reanimating them in watercolor, gouache, and ink. The results feel both antique and joltingly alive, like a pressed flower found between the pages of a secret love note.

Viewers surrounded by Barnes’s paintings at the opening of “Convert Light Energy” at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in KentNatalia Zukerman

Morejohn, meanwhile, draws with a kind of meditative, trance-like quality, letting lines tangle and mutate until they resemble nerve endings, snow crystals, maps of imaginary weather. Her drawings are not so much of nature as from it — diagrams of an ever-changing world.

The show’s title, “Convert Light Energy,” describes both artists’ reverance for the fleeting and delicate — attempts not so much to preserve what fades, but to transform it into something fierce, tender, and alive.

The show runs through June 8 at Kenise Barnes Fine Art, 7 Fulling Lane, Kent.