Gretchen Forrest

The Quiet Between is an invitation to pause and listen inward. These encaustic works, built from layers of wax and pigment, explore light, texture, and emotional nuance. Each piece reveals itself slowly—scraped, fused, and shaped until something surprising surfaces: a flicker of memory, mood, a feeling out of reach.

The process is intuitive and reflective, echoing personal experiences and shifting moods. What emerges is a quiet visual landscape, resonant and layered.

This series offers gentle space—for presence, curiosity, and stillness. Connection here is subtle: a shimmer, a texture, a glow that drifts and settles. The Quiet Between doesn’t speak loudly—it unfolds softly, like a slow exhale.

Maps chart more than landscapes—they trace our lived relationships. In this series, I explore mapping not just as geography, but as emotional terrain. Each piece reflects the way physical locations become embedded with memory, meaning, and connection. A simple coordinate might hold a laugh shared, a quiet loss, a moment when everything changed.

These compositions build upon familiar cartographic forms—grids, routes, topographies—but evolve into intimate archives of experience. Wax, pigment, and mark-making blend together to evoke places where friendships were forged or solitude transformed into insight. These are locations where impressions formed—sometimes gently, sometimes indelibly—on both ourselves and others.

This series is a tribute to those places that hold echoes of our presence. Our experiences in these locations and spaces continue to resonate beyond time. The maps unfold as emotional landscapes, inviting viewers to recall their own places of origin, intersection, and revelation.

Each map is not only an attempt to locate—it’s a way to remember.

This encaustic series unfolds like fragments of memory—elusive glimpses into nature’s quiet majesty. Through layers of translucent wax, cool and calming tones build immersive atmospheres where light filters, diffuses, and reappears. Each work invites personal interpretation: abstract impressions hint at a forest canopy dappled with sun, distant ocean waves curling in perpetual motion, or the hush of fresh snow blanketing the ground on a crisp morning.

Scenes hover between the seen and the felt—branches reach out through misty veils, water shimmers in still motion, snow glows softly under pale skies. They are not records of specific places, but emotive traces of experience. The encaustic technique deepens this ambiguity, allowing each piece to breathe with quiet resonance and dreamlike dimension.

These landscapes don’t ask to be named, instead, they whisper.

In Stillness Through Sequence, I explore encaustic as both medium and metaphor—layering wax and pigment to build spaces of quiet reflection. Grounded in repetition and pattern, each work is shaped by a meditative rhythm of carving, marking, and layering that echoes life’s routines and emotional traces.

This process balances spontaneity and precision, creating harmony through intentional structure. The repeated gestures become visual recordings—moments of presence, thought, and feeling. Ultimately, this series offers calm through consistency, inviting viewers into a contemplative space where meaning lives in pattern and stillness.

Digits 0–9 transcend function to become symbolic markers of memory, emotion, and ritual. Drawn from personal dates, places, and moments, these numerical sequences evoke life’s turning points through the layered language of encaustic. Each composition is a quiet offering—abstract yet resonant—designed to be felt rather than read, inviting viewers to connect through their own codes of remembrance. This series transforms numbers into emotional anchors, forming a contemplative space where recollection and reflection quietly unfold.