With Quiet Hands

Exhibited: The rOGUE Gallery, Eastern Edge, St. John’s, NL
2025

With Quiet Hands is a series of watercolour paintings that explore the delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Through a reverent celebration of butchery as both craft and ritual, the work reflects on our evolving relationships with food, identity, and sustainability.

The series is drawn directly from my first-hand experience on a local farm, where I learned how to process animals. By participating in the labour of butchery, I translate the physical skill into a visual language. Gestures of cutting and preparing become meditations on attention, precision, and respect. In this reframing, butchery emerges not only as a means of survival but as a ritual act. It is an offering, a practice of gratitude, and an intimate exchange between human and animal.

These paintings invite viewers to pause and consider their own relationship to food sources at a time when most people encounter meat only as a packaged commodity, stripped of origin and context. They ask: what does it mean to eat something you have never seen whole, never witnessed in life, and never understood in its transformation?

By dwelling in this space between reverence and discomfort, With Quiet Hands proposes that acts of preparation and consumption can be reminders of care, transformation, and interconnectedness. The work asks the viewer to find beauty, ritual, and meaning in what might otherwise be hidden or forgotten.

With special thanks to Windy Heights Farms.
image credit: Eastern Edge - Laura Sbrizzi