Visual artist Faryn Davis explores imagery from the corners of consciousness.

The blackbirds are flying off the walls at Blackbird Bakery.

Island artist Faryn Davis has already sold six works from her first-ever Bainbridge exhibition, a flock of small acrylic and resin paintings featuring images of blackbirds on view at the Winslow bakery through March.

Davis, a North Carolina native who moved here last summer from Seattle, started creating the bird series a year ago, inspired by a photograph she’d taken.

“I had taken a photo of a bird on a line, a bird against open sky,” she said. “It was just sort of lonely, but hopeful in a way. I decided to go off that photograph.”

The works are acrylic and ink paintings on wood, with several layers of resin over that surface.

In the layers of resin are embedded natural materials, including grass, feathers and bones. Some paintings also have embedded text.

To create her art, Davis begins by laying a board flat and laying out, on that surface, as many as six three- or five- inch-square paintings she works at the same time.

She starts with a color field, painting in the sky.

“Then, from that, I imagine a bird flying, (and) I lay that image down,” she said.

After completing the bird images in ink and acrylic, Davis builds a mold around each image on the board, and then pours successive layers of resin, into which she places found objects.

“That part’s kind of random,” she said. “I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to do that. As I do the casting, I throw (in) a little bit of grass, I arrange it a little bit. Or the resin might float it… My studio is on an incline, so sometimes I’ll do a pouring and the resin will flow one way and the grass will kind of go with it.”

When the resin is hard, Davis pulls away the sides of the mold, and cuts up the board into individual works.

Last, she polishes the resin to a matte finish.

The resulting artworks are remarkable in their authority, their ability to conjure vast, dream-like spaces in small containers.

“People ask me to describe the mood that they are,” Davis said. “It’s kind of like something on the edge of your memory, something just barely remembered. Or something forgotten.”

Davis’ background in sculpture – she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2000 – is evident in her skillful use of layering to build depth.

Through college she worked small, making boxed pieces she calls “sacred reliquaries,” and her current works have roots in those sculptures rather than evolving from flat paintings.

“In school, my concentration was sculpture and mixed media, so I was already working with a lot of different materials,” she said, “so when I picked up on resin, I really loved it.

“It was just a natural outpouring from there to combine different organic elements and text.”

While many artists tackle collage, few do so with Davis’ sensitivity.

Her ability to meld found objects and disparate materials into a moving image is what distinguishes her – and it’s an advanced aesthetic problem.

Artists who combine materials have to walk a line: not enough manipulation and the items retain too much individual identity to form a new whole; too much and the art seems overworked.

Beyond technique, the content must compel, so that every element is in service to the imagery.

Davis will open another show in Ballard in April, so islanders who don’t catch the Blackbird Bakery display will have another chance to see a body of work.

But her sales to date suggest that collectors may want to claim a blackbird before the flock departs for the big city.

“It’s been really good, it’s been quite successful,” Davis said. “It’s my first show on Bainbridge, (and) it’s a new audience.”

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For the birds

Winslow artist Faryn Davis’ “Mora Series” is on display at Blackbird Bakery through the end of this month. Her website is www.fernworks.org.