Based in rural upstate New York, Audrey Bialke works primarily as a painter to create fantastical scenes that combine her interest in spiritual traditions, Pagan iconography, and concerns regarding impending climate catastrophes. Bialke’s small-scale oil paintings on panel feature mythological creatures, such as dragons, winged lions, and unicorns, shown alongside domestic objects and pastoral landscapes suggesting a thread between fantasy and everyday human life. These sometimes anachronistic and surrealist juxtapositions draw attention to the human relationship with imagined fauna and flora, a nod to the artist’s keen interest in our historical relationship to the natural world.

Culling from an interest in Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Bialke frames each painted scene with an elaborate decorative border. In some of these designs, Bialke seeks to recontextualize botanical imagery from the Voynich Manuscript, which is a so far untranslatable and indecipherable manuscript from the early 15th century. These borders, which also act as an ode to early domestic patterning, further accentuate the feel of a composed visual narrative and suggest that a story is being told in symbols. The paintings become an allegory of a real and imagined past and present, as well as of life, death, and that mystical place in-between.