Plants need their space. The seed packets all say so: Give each one 18 inches, or rows three feet apart, or a mound with a 12-foot diameter. Surely not, I think in May. These seeds will be lonely out here in this expanse of barely thawed dirt. Now it’s August, and I must arm myself with a machete to find the tomatoes.
In “Sensitive Seeds,” a solo show at the Phoenix in Waterbury, Mary Lynn Burke evokes an entwined sense of landscapes both emotional and botanical with her near-abstract jungle-tinged paintings. It is a first solo presentation for the Lexington, Mass., artist, who holds a master’s degree in clinical social work. In 2020, she moved to New Zealand for two and a half years, an experience she cites as transformative for her art practice.
In a YouTube video for the podcast “I Like Your Work,” Burke explains how she started out taking hundreds of photos of the rugged coastline. But as she began to spend more time alone in nature, “eventually I just wanted to put my camera and all my gear away and just work with my hands,” she said. That impulse led Burke, a trained photographer, to create cyanotypes using sun and seawater.
Cyanotype is one of the oldest photo processes, often characterized by stark white images of flowers or leaves against a deep-blue background; the objects are placed directly on paper coated in light-sensitive chemicals. Burke exposed her prints outside, recording the fleeting shadows of bubbles in water or drifting sand instead of solid forms. Eventually, she started painting over the images, which led to the series shown here.
One’s sense of what should be where goes pleasingly haywire.
Most of the works in the exhibition are bright and large, around 5 or 6 feet in each dimension. Burke uses a combination of mediums — acrylics, oils, oil stick and spray paint, as well as cyanotype — on raw linen. These works are human-scale and muscular, evidenced by marks made not just with a brush but with the artist’s whole arm.
Burke’s breadth of painting techniques serves to open up her canvases, letting the viewer fall into thin, wide washes or snag their eye on a chunky scribble. “Red Reign,” a vertical canvas 5 feet wide and more than 6 feet high, features a gauzy, wet-into-wet expanse of mucky greens reminiscent of an algae bloom. In the foreground, intense ledges of ultramarine blue and vertical swaths of pale peach are punctuated with vibrant yellow and red. There is almost a depth-of-focus effect, as when the subject of a photo blurs with distance. In the painting, one’s sense of what should be where goes pleasingly haywire without such a visual structure, creating the vertiginous feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff.
Airiness pervades “Catch and Release,” which could be a beach scene. Raw canvas and blotchy blue cyanotype give an impression of sand and water; robust horizontal brushstrokes describe a ground, and vertical ones suggest a forest in the distance. Looping scarlet oil stick delineates boughs that appear to bob up and down like Seussian trees.
Burke sometimes starts out by painting cyanotype fluid onto unstretched canvas, often working on the floor or the ground outside. The process captures light passing through the tree canopy overhead or her own shadow across the canvas. But even though none of that comes through directly in the work — the cyanotype blue could easily be mistaken for another color of paint, and its forms are totally abstract — Burke’s unusual technique serves to build her compositions around an awareness of natural light.
The airy pieces in the show contrast with denser ones, such as “Stray Echo,” a tunnel of insistent indigo, green and pink marks that lets through a single open area of yellowish white, like a patch of sky as seen while lying in a field. “Wishing Tree” is confrontational, with powder-blue, lime-green and fire engine-red scribbles vying for space in a thicket of dark-blue slashes. Its overall effect is one of pointiness. “In Person,” slightly smaller than the others at 45 by 40 inches, barely lets the viewer in, creating an up-close wall of marks in a dark palette of purple, green and blue gem tones. The paint moves your eye across the canvas, but the picture plane is completely claustrophobic.
The longer one looks at these paintings, the more psychological effects creep in. That’s most apparent with “In Hiding on a Blue Bird Day,” the largest work in the show at 94 by 61 inches. It’s the most directly representational: a valley unfolding into the distance, where a kindergarten-yellow sun dips toward a mountain slope over a tree-shaped tree. The landscape is all just too much — too loud, too busy, too saturated — without becoming cartoony or predictable. Burke casts it as simultaneously overwhelming and alluring.
Curator Joseph Pensak has also included a suite of smaller works in the show — a couple of drawings and a few paintings, mostly in the 9- to 16-inch range. These don’t have the variety of mark making that shines in the larger works, but the intimate scale gets you right up close and allows Burke to experiment with transparent paint and a vibrant palette. The colors in “Nocturnal Life,” for instance, match each others’ intensity of hue except for a washed-out turquoise hole. “Sensitive Seeds” takes that same shade and solidifies it into a thick opaque form that vies for importance with dark reds and greens. There’s a sense of play in these little pieces, though it’s quieter than in the big ones.
On their way out, viewers shouldn’t miss “Wild Things” in the window, a 77-by-66-inch painting that incorporates dripping, rain cloud-dark volumes and a blackish-pink surface that reads as water. Its details are easily lost behind the reflections in the glass. Perhaps that’s appropriate, though, for work that catches the eye with lushness and light, then asks you to take a step back.
Paintings, plants and people alike, they seem to say, could all use a little breathing room. ➆
“Mary Lynn Burke: Sensitive Seeds,” on view through December 31 at the Phoenix in Waterbury.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Breathing Room | Mary Lynn Burke’s abstract botanicals stake out space at the Phoenix in Waterbury”
This article appears in August 5 • 2026.
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