'Stratum: A Layered Perspective of South Florida' Exhibition

Event Description

The Deering Estate ‘Contemporary Currents’ series is an annual program that integrates contemporary art with collections and historic houses. Artists are selected from the roster of past and current Artists-in-Residence at the Deering Estate to display their work on the second floor of the Richmond Cottage for a three to six-month period.

Stratum: a Layered Perspective of South Florida exhibits Deering Estate’s 2025-2026 Artist-in-Residence Andrea Clement’s encaustic paintings, which capture the complexities of South Florida’s unique geological and hydrological landscape. Andrea Clement is a longtime practitioner of encaustic art, using heated beeswax, pigments, and damar resin to create vibrant, abstract paintings. Her residency has been spent exploring the earth’s physical structure, its history, and the processes which actuate its evolution.

The encaustic paintings examine geological forces through the passage of time with hydrology: the movement, quantity and management of water on earth. Clement draws from observation of Deering Estate’s waterfront view of Biscayne Bay and current restoration projects, such as the Cutler Slough Restoration Project and Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. The paintings involve Clement’s interest in and observation of geology: the physical structure, substances, and processes that act on the earth. She embodies geologic movements through abstract representations of oolite, fossils, erosion, infiltration, evapotranspiration, plate tectonics, geologic time, sedimentation. Through a process of layering, refining and carving pigmented beeswax, Clement creates colorful, heavily textured paintings that vivify the relationship between South Florida’s water and oolite sediments. At the center of the depicted geological processes, as it manifests in Clement’s work, is stratum: to layer. Just as encaustic painting begets the layering beeswax and resin, South Florida is composed of intricate layers which host its history and connect its inhabitants to the passage of time.

Installed in The Garden Room, a historic space in the Richmond Cottage at the Deering Estate, the exhibition will be on view from May 1 to July 20, 2026.