This October, Waterstone welcomes painter Shannon Carlson to the gallery and is pleased to present her latest series of work, WILD Abandoned. Carlson's new paintings are centered in conservation themes, the ephemeral quality of our wild places and the ways in which we are compelled to protect them. In her work, Carlson explores a narrative of constant change - a story of nature's perpetual and permeable qualities, alongside that of climate change denial on a grand scale. Carlson invites the viewer to consider the power dynamics at play in pushing our condition perilously close to the edge, while still remaining hopeful and reverent of nature and its resilience.

Shannon Carlson is a Pacific Northwest encaustic artist, based in Portland, Oregon. Her work is influenced by a sense of place - particularly wild places, the delicate balance of our ecosystem, and the work of conservation. Balance and transformation are also reflected in the way these paintings are created - with marks made, reduced, and shifted with pigments, wax, water and torch fire in flux.