Local artist Bettina Harvey’s Mood Ring (Dendrochroma) Series hits Science World, to February 4, 2022
Drawings of driftwood emblazoned with vivid colour gradients stemmed from watching her father live with dementia
Mood Ring (Dendrochroma) Series by Betinna Harvey.
Science World presents Bettina Harvey’s Mood Ring (Dendrochroma) Series at the Science World Atrium until February 4, 2022
BETTINA HARVEY EMBRACES the natural world within her art and beyond.
Based in Tsawwassen, she earned her BFA at Montreal’s Concordia University before working as a horticulturist and gardener for the City of Vancouver, designing floral displays for major parks. Over time, she merged her interests, coming full circle to explore the intersection of humanity and nature through fine arts.
Harvey’s Mood Ring (Dendrochroma) Series grew out of an earlier project called Drift, which featured renderings of driftwood to reflect her father’s experiences living with dementia.
Here, she uses the same piece of driftwood as a foundation for several images, painting it with various vivid colour gradients to reflect shifts in emotional states. She’s riffing off the rings that were popular in the 1970s and that changed shades purportedly to show the wearer’s mood (when in fact the thermotropic liquid crystals inside the finger jewellery reacted to changes in body temperature). Harvey’s work explores our fascination with colours to convey feelings.
“The images in Bettina Harvey’s series Dendrochroma re-imagine the science of dendrochronology across the experience of the aging human mind, and the changes over time in personality, perception, and emotion,” her statement reads. “Where dendrochronology accounts for the life span and variances of a tree through counting and analyzing the concentric rings that circle through its trunk, Harvey’s pieces use colour gradients to suggest the imprint of the past on a person’s aging experience.
“Invoking the mood of past eras—the punchy brights of the early eighties, or the blending techniques of nineties design trends—the colours in Harvey’s series represent the imprint of bygone eras on the mind and personality.”
Access to the exhibition is included with admission to Science World.
For more information, see https://www.scienceworld.ca/ or https://www.bettinaharvey.com/.
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