This body of silkscreen prints grew out of Michelle Atkinson’s summer research residency at AUArts, where she returned to a process she last practiced more than 20 years ago. Rekindling her love of silkscreen reconnected her with the precision and layering of her graphic design background, now redirected toward environmental narratives.

Each work begins with climate data from recent wildfires — translated into luminous, cloudlike forms that draw the viewer in with colour, texture, and sparkle. From the candy-coated whimsy of Bubblegum Sky to the stormy weight of Jasper and Evros, these pieces play with allure and denial, seduction and catastrophe.

By disguising environmental trauma in beauty, Atkinson asks us to consider how we, too, gloss over reality — hiding disaster behind filters, spectacle, and distraction, even as the world burns around us.