Sanctuary opens tonight and runs through 3 September. Two painters, nineteen works, and a collection that turns around a whale.

Britt Freda wrote the show's origin down plainly. Newly empty-nested last winter, she found a hollowness she could not shake, and went to a village on the west coast of Mexico — the place her own mother has gone to find sanctuary since Freda was a young child. On the boat ride over she was greeted by a breaching humpback, and she wept. Whales, she says, are holy.

That painting is Here, Whales are Gods: thirty by sixty inches of birch panel, the largest work in the show. A humpback rises across five feet of it, and the sea it rises through is built entirely of stones — hundreds of rounded cells in slate, bone, ochre and pale green, each one outlined and filled by hand, so the water reads as mosaic rather than movement. Above the waterline the panel turns to gold leaf laid in broken sheets, torn at the edges and left unblended. The animal itself is worked in graphite and grey-white acrylic, the only part of the painting not made of cells. The source photograph is courtesy of Marla Smith Photography.

That cell — the small outlined shape she uses for a feather, a stone, a flower head — is the method the whole collection is built from. In Here, moths seed dreams under a misty moon, four feet square, it carries furthest from any single creature: four moths hang against a pale ground above a meadow assembled from discs, hundreds of them, stacked on stems that are themselves narrow vertical bands of grey. Seen from across a room it resolves into weather. Up close it never stops being individual marks.

The titles are worth reading as a set. Nearly all of them begin with the same word — Here, Pelican is an Author and Historian; Here, Frigate is a Pilot; Here, Carpenter Bee is an Architect; Here, A Sea Turtle is My Father; Here, love is everything. The repetition is doing work. Each one proposes a place where the ordinary assignment of roles has been redrawn, and the paintings are the evidence.

Teresa Smith holds the quieter register of the same island. Along The River, Forest Grove, A Path In, Life At The Pond, Place For A Picnic — landscapes that stay close to walking pace, where the interest is in how light sits on water and how a path proposes a direction without insisting on one. Hung against Freda's gold and mosaic, they give the room somewhere to rest.

One note on the wall: Chocolaté Dulce is on view and available, and at the artist's request its image is not being published while the work is still in progress. It is worth seeing in person for that reason alone.

Sanctuary is on the wall at 176 Winslow Way E, Bainbridge Island, from 7 August through 3 September. Every available work is documented online with its price.