Natural Form: Allison James, Bethany Mabee, Morgan Walker
Art & Light Gallery is thrilled to present Natural Form an exhibition of work by Allison James (Central, G.A.), Bethany Mabee (Peoria, I.L.) and Morgan Walker (Florence, S.C.) launching on the Art & Light website and in the gallery at 10am (EST) on Tuesday, June 2 with an opening reception on Friday, June 5 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. In Natural Form, the artists explore organic shapes through abstraction, each approaching a shared visual language from a distinct perspective. Familiar organic elements are softened, fragmented, and reimagined through gesture, color, and mark, shifting between recognition and ambiguity. The work moves between control and intuition, inviting viewers into a meditation on growth, transformation, and the emotional terrain embedded within the natural world.
Allison James is a contemporary abstract painter inspired by the messy, thrilling terrain of human experience and motherhood. She transforms heightened emotions and unresolved feelings into layered works defined by saturated color, subtle detail, and signature silhouettes she calls her “decoder ring things,” inviting personal interpretation. Her process is both cathartic and reflective—distilling heavier themes into compositions that feel unexpectedly light in their final form. For James, the body of work included in Natural Form is a meditation on the emotional terrain of motherhood. Familiar floral imagery is abstracted into forms that verge on unrecognizable, reflecting the ways identity shifts and reshapes. Delicate lines meet expressive, block-like forms to suggest the rhythm of a full day, while nuanced color choices and layered motifs allow space for interpretation as these relationships evolve.
Bethany Mabee is an abstract painter and textile designer who has spent over 20 years immersed in the interior design industry while simultaneously cultivating her painting and studio practice. Each step in Bethany’s process refuels a future process, becoming a symbol of continuous and cyclical expansion. Her work serves as a moving meditation that explores improvisation through interactions with color and material. Completed paintings take on new life through the methodical process of pattern creation for fabric and wallpaper. This pattern creation becomes an extended exploration of contrast by transforming painting improvisation into intentional digital design. Mabee states, “As someone who learns through experimentation, I love to mirror this in the studio by starting each piece without a plan beyond palette. I apply fluid layers of paint and allow color and water to interact naturally. These experiments become compositional blueprints for secondary structural layers that explore the relationship between structure and flow.”
Contemporary artist Morgan Walker’s work reflects a deeply personal relationship with control, rooted in her observations of life’s unpredictable nature. This exploration began while witnessing her late father’s frustrations with the loss of control over his penmanship due to Parkinson’s disease, juxtaposed with her then young daughter’s blissful lack of awareness of control while coloring all over the page. Over time, this theme expanded to encompass Walker’s own struggles with mental health and the broader realization that we truly control very little. Her wet-on-wet technique mirrors this tension by allowing the paint to move freely while the use of tools guides the medium. With this method of working with paint she is able to shape her subject matter with intention, but never full control.
