Havilah Aos is a sculptural painter interested in breaking through social constructions and false dichotomy between nature and culture to explore a fundamental reorientation of perception. She focuses on the elemental substances that make up the natural world, using nontraditional materials to represent these substances, involving them in a variety of forms and imagery. Using dimensional painting as her starting point, she displaces and combines natural substance with familiar objects and art-making processes to tap into the complex connotations of the earth’s matter in the environment of our modern world and to investigate the historical relationship between art, science and alchemy. She builds paintings of these substances working from emotional memories, creating a surface of convoluted form like incomplete memories but built up with the meticulousness of scientific observation. She investigates soil, water, stone, minerals, gasses, wood, metals, oil, etc., and their agency apart from as well as in the settings of their environment influenced by the ideas of phenomenology, ecology, object oriented ontology and theories of perception.
Painting acts as an image, window, portal and activated object through which to enact this research, but only as a beginning. The work is subjected to violent, immersive events representing the movements of time in both its impactful and subtle ways. She explores the movements of the substances as well as their individual properties as a form of questioning and experimentation to test or proof the material, simultaneously testing her own assumptions.