Aurora Loop Gallery is showcasing a local encaustic printmaker and visual artist this month, with an opportunity to meet the artist herself during this month’s First Saturday Art Walk.

Encaustic painting applies heated wax and colored pigments to various surfaces as canvases, and Port Townsend’s Victoria Foster Harrison created two series of encaustic creations — her “Suspended Forms” 3D wall sculptures, and her “Weathered Vignettes” mixed-media works of paper, wax and ink — that Aurora Loop is showcasing under the banner of “Heaven and Earth.”

“Heaven and Earth” explores the themes and interactions of water, sky and earth, which the artist intended to capture “nature’s timeless rhythms.” It also includes Harrison’s “Vessels,” which she describes as “natural handcrafted sculptural forms, made with organic materials and textures.”

Harrison works on encaustic prints, collages and multi-layered media from her boutique Curly Girl Art Studio in Port Townsend, often combining pigmented beeswax with paper and fabric to create monotypes and paintings.

“Heaven and Earth” introduces her new use of encaustiflex, a microfiber that she said works “beautifully” with pigmented beeswax.

Indeed, Harrison touted the combination of encaustiflex with beeswax as yielding “a dynamic surface” that can be cut, layered, twisted and stitched, which she sees as the foundation of her “Suspended Forms” series, since it explores not only texture, but also “movement, crisp lines and organic flow.”

Harrison described her “Suspended Forms” wall sculptures as being meant to capture “nature’s ever-changing spirit,” with works such as “Soaring” and “Waves to Shore,” whose motion and texture seek to evoke open skies and flowing water.

Her “Weathered Vignettes” series was created to complement this, with works such as “Veins of the Earth” and “Copper Rhythms” conveying “timeless landscapes,” through materials including pigmented wax, ink, handmade paper, and even copper brads and incense-burned holes.

The Aurora Loop Gallery, located at 971 Aurora Loop in Port Townsend,  formally described Harrison’s “Weathered Vignettes” as “layers of ephemera.”

Harrison’s “Vessels” were crafted from tissue and traditional Japanese wash papers, along with cotton and even tea bags, to be both decorative and functional, striving for a balance between utilitarian form and aesthetic appeal.

Harrison emphasized that her work isn’t just about her materials, but is meant to reflect a balance between structural precision of experimental spontaneity, while the Aurora Loop Gallery likewise stated that her encaustic printmaking “is not merely a mechanical act of transferring wax to paper.”

According to Aurora Loop, “Heaven and Earth” showcases “one-of-a-kind” artworks that carry “the freshness of new ideas, realized on the spot,” bearing “the imprints of fleeting thoughts and captured feelings.”

Harrison said she pledges to “start each day with a spirit of adventure.” “Heaven and Earth” runs from Dec. 5-29 during the gallery’s regular hours,   noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Harrison will be on site to meet the public at a reception on Saturday, Dec. 7, from 5-8 p.m.