Beauty Through Ashes by Patty Bowman Kingsley

Scugog Arts presents Patty Bowman Kingsley’s sculptural and found material art exhibition ‘Beauty through Ashes’, running from February 7th – March 1st, 2026.  

Through her eyes, Patty Bowman Kingsley describes Beauty through Ashes as a process and not just a theme or proposal. This process is an expression of the compressed nature of lived experience over time. Collected images, files, objects, and corresponding memories from lands and peoples that have been recollected, categorized, and reduced or transmuted into ash and crushed powders – before taking on new material form as two and three-dimensional objects. 

 In her words: 

“Fueled by oxygen and substance, fire consumes, transmutes, and repositions history to posit a renewed voicing of infinite connection and correlation to finite forms, consumed and reduced to the signature materiality of ash. In one’s lived experiences, heat from the fire of life may sterilize the evidence of history. It can be more than a soul a heart can bear, yet if we endure, the fire burns away the old, renewing us to begin again.

Wisdom gathers within our lived experiences, like elements assembled in a periodic table, identifying the science of living within our earthly shell, as materiality collects within the soul of our being and the soles of our shoes. Collected mementos, such as pottery shards, branches, or coral gifted by the earth, are elemental moments that anchor us.

Seed pods, glass, and dried wood form mnemonic connections with the planet. These objects, ground into powders, infuse collected ash with expressive life stories across time in new forms.” 

• Patty Bowman Kingsley 

Come and experience Patty Bowman Kingsley’s expression of renewed life in ‘Beauty through Ashes’ as it breathes vitality into the traces of the past on our shoes, and the physical histories present through materiality and elemental moments. All are welcome on February 7th, 1-3PM @ Scugog Arts Space for the Artist Reception where light snacks and refreshments will be served. See you there!