Demi Danka’s practice engages with material instability, harnessing the transformative potential of chemical reactions and elemental forces. Working with light-sensitive surfaces and volatile solutions, she navigates a process shaped by urgency and limitation—a race against time before the image risks overexposure or collapse. The surfaces are not static but remain in flux, continuously responding to their environment. Light is an active agent, shifting the composition in real-time. In this way, the work behaves like a performance, an unfolding event where live transformation happens in plain sight.

 

Time is not merely a condition of the process but a subject in itself, an omnipresent force that governs both creation and dissolution. Her materials water, air, and light are the very elements that sustain life, yet in excess, they become agents of erosion and disappearance. These forces do not settle but move across the surface, staining, corroding, and blooming in ways that can only be partially directed. Danka's intervention is both precise and precarious, halting reactions at the threshold of obliteration, an act of preservation against inevitable loss. This engagement is deeply physical, demanding endurance, patience, and surrender. The surfaces bear the traces of exertion, gestures of interruption, reapplication, and adaptation. Yet they continue to shift beyond the moment, subtly altering with light and time. As the conditions around them change, so too do their tonalities, densities, and transparencies. 

 

Danka's paintings function as both records and remnants, mapping the delicate equilibrium between presence and absence, control and entropy. Surfaces are etched, blistered, and weathered, revealing textures that speak to the volatility of process and material. Colour moves unpredictably, bleeding and pooling, evoking both tenderness and rupture. The residual marks—scarred yet luminous—demand close attention, inviting the viewer into a suspended space where time, memory, and transformation converge. By embracing instability and scratching into the surfaces with salt crystals her practice becomes a meditation on resilience, on how we endure, adapt, and persist in the face of inevitable change. The works exist in a state of becoming, resisting finality, their surfaces continuing to evolve. Each painting is not just an object but an event, an unfolding negotiation with time, environment, and impermanence.