My work explores navigation: how we locate ourselves, interpret patterns, and find our way through change. Over the past decade, my practice has moved in cadence with scientific discoveries, drawing on environmental science, celestial navigation, satellite imagery, and space travel.
Using encaustic, an ancient painting medium made with pigmented beeswax, I give physical form to contemporary scientific imagery and ideas. This intersection between an ancient, analog process and technologies that reveal our world grounds the work. Layered wax and oil translate satellite perspectives, particle trajectories, and orbital paths into tactile surfaces, holding traces of movement and change.
Intersections brings together bodies of work that connect receding glaciers, celestial movement, currents, and the trajectories of colliding particles. These subjects become an evolving visual language of circles, intersecting lines, and shifting fields.
At the center of the exhibition are four recent Mapping Buoyancy paintings. They bring these investigations together through the image of the buoy, a form in my work that originated in images of particle collisions recorded in a bubble chamber and has evolved through my observations of river navigation. The buoy becomes both a point of orientation and a symbol of resilience, responding to movement while remaining anchored.
Across these works, mapping is an ongoing act of observation and discovery. The intersections between the microscopic, terrestrial, and celestial offer ways to consider our own position within a world in continual motion.
Elise Wagner
