The Power of Grey

Grey holds more than we might first imagine: wisdom, strength, softness, and the space between certainty and change.

In The Power of Grey, artist Karen Brown brings together encaustic paintings and hand-built ceramics in an exhibition spanning three gallery spaces at the Alton Mill Arts Centre. Visitors are invited to move through Listening, Softening, and Integrating, pausing along the way to discover their own connections with the work.

Encaustic is an ancient painting process using molten beeswax, damar resin, and pigment, with each layer fused by heat. Brown combines this luminous medium with photography, watercolour, and other mixed media to create surfaces that reveal and conceal, holding traces of image and memory within the wax.

Florals evoke the beauty of opening, fading, and changing with age. Owls suggest watchfulness and wisdom, while landscapes offer moments of stillness. Hand-built ceramic vessels, some incorporating found river stones, extend these ideas into tactile forms.

Presented with Headwaters Arts, The Power of Grey invites visitors to consider grey as a place of depth, possibility, and quiet confidence.