The Landscapes of Hiraeth
Local Artist Talk with Joy Barry

Friday, March 6 at 2:00 p.m.
In-person in Community Rooms AB

In this artist talk, local encaustic painter Joy Barry shares the inspiration behind her ongoing series, The Landscapes of Hiraeth.

Rooted in the untranslatable Welsh word hiraeth – a deep longing for home, for place, or for what has been lost – the series explores themes of memory, migration and ancestral ties to the land.

Using molten beeswax, damar resin, natural pigments and mixed media, Barry layers light, texture, and translucency to evoke
both the beauty and the grief embedded in landscapes shaped by history. She will discuss her creative process, the historical narratives that inform the work, and the ways in which encaustic itself embodies the tension between permanence and fragility.

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About the Artist:

Joy Barry is a visual artist working primarily in encaustic, drawn to the medium’s balance of opacity and transparency, permanence and fragility. Barry’s work explores absence, ambiguity, and memory and is deeply influenced by personal history. Through layering, burning and embedding, Barry create surfaces that both reveal and obscure, which become visual languages for longing and the unsaid.

Barry says, “Art is less about resolution than reverence. It’s a way of listening more deeply to life itself.”

Learn more about Joy, and her art, on her website: joybarryart.com/