Manipulated Forms: Nature’s Duality in Materiality brings together sculptural and painted works that investigate the overlapping forces of violence and vulnerability, and the shifting boundary between human and non-human. Working with materials such as clay, wood, found objects, oil, and pastel, the exhibition focuses on how natural systems are disrupted, altered, and reconfigured through human interaction.

In both two and three dimensions, soft forms are set against rigid structures. Scenes of predation, decay, and transformation are presented not as metaphors, but as material facts-inviting a direct engagement with the tension between organic processes and imposed systems. The sculptural components combine industrial and natural elements, displaying the friction between permanence and impermanence, control and collapse.  Rather than framing nature as pure or ideal, the work presents it as contradictory: precise and unstable, intimate and destructive. The forms operate within this duality, using material relationships to examine the intersections of nature, survival, power, and connection.

At its core, the exhibition resists the impulse to look away. It challenges what is considered acceptable or beautiful within society, confronting the viewer with the raw uncomfortable realities that underlie both human and non-human systems. Through the subjects depicted and the use of animal remains. By refusing to sanitize violence or vulnerability, the work asks for sustained attention-to witness rather than avert, to see not only harmony but also rupture as an essential part of being.

This exhibition is a collaboration between Takira Bolton, a visual artist working primarily in oil paint, watercolour pastel, and pencil crayon on wood and sculptor Jesse Weemering whose practice combines hand-molded clay, carved wood, and found objects from both natural and industrial sources. Together, their works examine the boundaries between human and non-human, and how violence, vulnerability, and transformation manifest through material form.

Manipulated Forms brings together painting and sculpture in dialogue, uniting Bolton’s and Weemering’s shared interest in the dualities of nature and the human impulse to manipulate it. The exhibition challenges viewers to confront what is often looked away from-revealing the coexistence of destruction and tenderness as inseparable aspects of life and survival.

“The Light Within”

In our physical world there is what we can see on the outside when we look at a face, or an animal, a tree or a mountain. But what we cannot see is what lies within, the essence. You could call it the soul, or the light. It is that light within that I try to capture in my paintings.

I grew up in northern California. My childhood memories are exploring the wild hills nearby. Nature was and is the place where I am most at home, and hopefully my landscapes and animals reflect that love. I grew up with a father and mother who were both gifted artists. With their encouragement I learned early on the joy of artistic creation.

I came to Canada in 1973 to get a teaching credential at Simon Fraser University. I did my student teaching in Vernon and there I still live. For many years as a mother and teacher, I had little time for my own art. My creative energy went into developing an environment for encouraging the artist in the children I taught.

After retirement, I had time to devote to two loves—travel and painting. I preferred travelling to out of the way places where people live close to the earth—Tibet, Africa, Mongolia, Nepal. It was the faces of the people I met that became the subject for many of my paintings. I believe every human being has a story. I search for their expression, the story in their eyes, the line of the lips, the light on a cheek. I also paint people close to home, my friends and family. Each painting feels like a miracle, that slowly from a blank canvas a person emerges and takes on a life of his or her own. And while that person has changed, grown older, or perhaps is no longer alive, something of their life remains through the painting.