















Casa Main Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta
9 November 2024 – 11 January 2025
Dust to Dust brings together works spanning different periods – from Distillation: in her element (1998) to Seven Skies of Maralinga (2024). The entwined histories of art and science are seeded throughout.
Emerging from her decades-long research on nuclear culture, radiological inheritance, and scarred lands – during which Mary Kavanagh approached the subject of the atomic bomb from multiple perspectives – she has returned to long-standing preoccupations rooted in perception at the edge of visibility. Imaging skies began with pointing her camera straight up. Rayleigh scattering of sunlight into sublime blues and changing hues gave way to the contested skies of surveillance, atmospheric contamination, space colonization, and modern aerial warfare. Intimately tied to environmental degradation, climate decline, and economies of scale, the air as commons enters a state of precarity.
The exhibition includes works make with genuine Gold Leaf, sourced from Manetti in Florence, and Lapis Lazuli, prepared from gem grade rocks from Afghanistan using an ancient recipe.
Referencing the gilded heavens of pre-Enlightenment painting, the romantic sublime of nineteenth century cloud photographs, early scientific illustration, and twenty-first century data, this work pulls from an eclectic range of representations to consider sky’s essence, permeability and fragility, and the role it plays as a barometer for a changing planet.