WHERE ART INSPIRES CONNECTION
Celestial Bodies
featuring works by
Betsy Kenyon
Julia Westerbeke
Sept 6 - October 25, 2025
TINT is pleased to announce Celestial Bodies, featuring works by Betsy Kenyon and Julia Westerbeke. Both Kenyon and Westerbeke refer to their works as drawings, though neither uses traditional drawing tools or techniques. Kenyon uses a moving pinhole camera and film to draw with the sun. Westerbeke draws sculptural terrains by puncturing paper with a needle and dremel. Taking inspiration from the sky and beyond, Kenyon and Westerbeke create art that reflects on life cycles and the celestial forces that contribute to and influence these cycles. Both in Kenyon’s lengthy exposure times and Westerbeke’s meditative process, their works remind us to take a moment to look up.
Celestial Bodies marks Kenyon’s second exhibition at TINT.
Online Viewing Room
Kenyon uses both her body and a weather-worn pinhole camera to make her Solar Drawings using the sun itself as a drawing tool. Kenyon’s body moves a rotating device to which her pinhole camera is affixed. Her camera is made of wood and bound with electrical tape to protect the film inside. There is no viewfinder and no lens on this camera and exposures are made through a pinhole pierced through a thin sheet of brass. Without a lens, exposure times are considerably longer, allowing Kenyon more time to draw with the sun onto the camera’s film negatives. Her camera is pointed at the sky, we see lens-like shapes in space, the sun as light source, as fire, as a point to circle. The symbol of the circle; eternity, continuity, a cycle.
Taking inspiration from science fiction, celestial imagery, flora, and other biological forms, Julia Westerbeke builds intricate paper-based works. She thinks of these textural compositions on paper and panel as ‘sculptural drawings’ or ‘drawing terrains,’ each with a subtle nod to the entropic state of life, a quiet unraveling like a thread to pull. Ultimately, her work pays homage to the complexities of organic life, as well as its ceaseless regeneration, flux, and decay. The imagery exists somewhere between the alien and the organic, the familiar and the foreign, taking a page from Gaston Bachelard’s writings on the power of the oneiric and the ‘psychic weight’ embodied in certain imagery and objects. The process of making these works is often meditative, making a case for slowness in the act of making, and the act of looking.
Based out of New York City where the sky is often unseen or forgotten, Kenyon travels on foot, by plane, in a van making these Solar Drawings throughout North America and Europe. Expanding on her Outdoor Drawing series, exhibited at the United Nations in New York City, where drawings were made in bodies of water in the four cardinal directions of the contiguous United States, Kenyon now aims her camera skyward. What we see radiates and glows, continues and breaks up, flares and overlaps, revealing seasonal changes and a spectrum of color timely and unique to each exposure.
