Working alongside nature as much as on or within it, Bala reveals the beauty and systems governing even the least perceptible shifts in our environment. Offering an encounter with these elemental forces, Bala’s works envelop and immerse, extending us a chance to commune with nature full body. In a monumental painting "Flown Away" the vivid, inky depths and filmy streaks of indigo pigment attest to gravity’s ability to carve trails into topographies.

Bala inserts his works directly into the processes that work tectonically to give shape to our environment: erosion, gravity, condensation, wind, decay and regrowth. "Wind Curve," created over months, employ movements of air: terrains of deposited dust and pigment that become timescapes.

Bala advances his exploration with evaporative processes in new works, where he creates and controls the environment while allowing chance to “happen” registering the depths and residue of pigments. He pushes this self-reflexive turn still further where asymmetrical fields index the ways the canvas has been lifted from its armature, made dynamic – folded, creased and gathered over time.

Complex but unified, the lines and layers of Bala’s work reveal the energies that, although imperceptible in any given instant, are constantly shaping and re-shaping the material world.

“Nature” here is understood beyond its use as a material or a field for inspiration, instead Bala is interested in the processes that bind all matter together in an ongoing cycle of exchange and movement. 

Bala’s practice is characterized by its wide-ranging exploration across media, perhaps most notable in this exhibition is his return to printmaking, marking a reengagement with a medium that characterized the earliest moments of the artist’s career while he was a teenager. However, with reflecting more recent shifts in his practice including his turn towards a collaborative relationship with the natural world.