Bitter Bark

Irene Pantelis

Curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine


February 25th - March 21st, 2026

Irene Pantelis' Studio Gallery exhibition Bitter Bark recounts a personal and historical journey centered on the cinchona tree, source of quinine and long used to treat fevers. After discovering a photograph of this tree in her father’s Bolivian hometown, she tasted cinchona bark and began researching its global movement from Andean forests through colonial trade and medicine. The resulting paintings, made with watercolor, ink, and cinchona-derived dye, explore extraction, healing, migration, and survival. As pigments spread and settle, the quinine tree emerges as subject, witness, and living archive of memory, illness, empire, and the fragile persistence of life across landscapes and generations through time and care.