Kelly Berg records her immediate impressions of Hawaii’s craters, lava fields, and jagged formations in oily ink spread on a metal plate, simultaneously describing the landscape and relating to its viscous, craggy, texture.

The monoprints made from these metal prints are unique, even when Berg chooses to work with the ghost image of a used plate, she is manipulating and morphing the original image, like a memory that is constantly revisited. She is stimulated by the sublime, wrangling with the conflicting emotions of fear and attraction, of terror and awe. Her lifelong obsession with extreme weather and geology began during her childhood in Minnesota watching summer storms and visits to National Parks. After the Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano erupted in 2018, Berg returned, and observed “how the landscape had shifted and changed…a metaphor for the current state of our world and environment beyond Hawaii.”

Working at The Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa, Berg uses spikes and pyramids in the prints to represent the “volcanic energy within the island.” While this chaos is emblematic of our anxious age, Berg also uses the pyramid as a symbol of transcendence, providing an ancient human context within the shifting natural tangle of lightening and lava.