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Heather Harvey

Drawing, Painting, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

Awards Received

Independent Artist

2021

I am interested in paying attention to whatever can challenge normal, automated ways of thinking, seeing, and understanding. So that, even within our highly mechanized, monitored, categorized, quantified way of living, we can still find areas of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and flux that open us up to possibilities, wonder, and reimagining.

About the Artist

Heather Harvey is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work straddles traditional boundaries of painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation-based strategies. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Academy Art Museum in Easton MD, the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, and Salisbury University Galleries, MD. She also exhibited at The Painting Center (NYC), the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, NUTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), the William King Museum (VA), Denise Bibro (NYC), Vanderbilt University (TN), Page Bond Gallery (VA), and Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, CA. She received the Maryland Individual Artist Award (2014, 2017), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She was awarded resident fellowships at the Buinho Creative Hub (Portugal) Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her essay “Outliers, Fringes, Speculation, and Complicity,” was published in Creative Collaboration in Art Practice, Research, and Pedagogy in 2018.  Her writing has also been published in Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine, and NYArts. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Art + Art History at Washington College in Chestertown, MD.

Heather Harvey website Artist Website Heather Harvey website Instagram

Artist's Statement

I am interested in hidden infrastructures and invisible ordering mechanisms – things like gravity, quantum physics, and radio waves, but also the human body, memory, and contradictory emotions like aversion and affection. My work exists somewhere between painting, sculpture, and drawing, and embodies aspects of each. I often work directly on gallery walls with the same materials the walls are made of – plaster, paint, drywall, spackling – to subtly transform the placid, inanimate architectural space into something stranger and less expected. The wall becomes a fluid, fluctuating zone rather than a hard architectural divider; a flimsy barrier between here and somewhere else. The sense of suspended fluidity and accumulated layers capture and sustain ephemeral moments. As metaphoric embodiments of time, they evince a tenderness towards the material world, and the fleeting moments when things are made, changed or destroyed. All of this has to do with mortality as well. The bubbles, plops, puddles, and stains in my work reference the tragicomedy of inhabiting a human body, and allude to natural processes of transformation and decay. There is a tension between chaos, dissolution, and destruction on one hand, and order, balance, and beauty on the other. The work also deals with absence, empty space, and traces of things that cannot be seen or are no longer there. In some installations, there is a sense of a concealed event happening just behind the wall’s surface. This alludes to other intangibles: unseen infrastructures, unrelenting change, and half-intuited realities.

Featured Work

Photos

This painting is part of a series included in the exhibition, ‘The Thin Place,’ which comes from the old Celtic concept for moments of heightened permeability when veils that separate the living and dead or the human and divine are at their thinnest. It can also refer to specific places that possess a palpable ‘heaviness’ or haunted quality, particularly sacred sites or where something of great significance unfolded. I expand on these traditional meanings to include any transitional space, moment of uncertainty, or provisional period where everyday objects and experiences divide, collapse, intermingle, or coexist in unexpected ways. Moments of death and birth are perhaps the most intense and straightforward examples. Yet there are all kinds of ongoing subtle slips and thin divides in life once you start looking for them: the young becoming old. Material shifting into immaterial. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.
This installation is made with trash collected on walks. It is included in the exhibition, ‘The Thin Place,’ which comes from the old Celtic concept for moments of heightened permeability when veils that separate the living and dead or the human and divine are at their thinnest. It can also refer to specific places that possess a palpable ‘heaviness’ or haunted quality, particularly sacred sites or where something of great significance unfolded. I expand on these traditional meanings to include any transitional space, moment of uncertainty, or provisional period where everyday objects and experiences divide, collapse, intermingle, or coexist in unexpected ways. Moments of death and birth are perhaps the most intense and straightforward examples. Yet there are all kinds of ongoing subtle slips and thin divides in life once you start looking for them: the young becoming old. Material shifting into immaterial. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.
This painting is part of a series included in the exhibition, ‘The Thin Place,’ which comes from the old Celtic concept for moments of heightened permeability when veils that separate the living and dead or the human and divine are at their thinnest. It can also refer to specific places that possess a palpable ‘heaviness’ or haunted quality, particularly sacred sites or where something of great significance unfolded. I expand on these traditional meanings to include any transitional space, moment of uncertainty, or provisional period where everyday objects and experiences divide, collapse, intermingle, or coexist in unexpected ways. Moments of death and birth are perhaps the most intense and straightforward examples. Yet there are all kinds of ongoing subtle slips and thin divides in life once you start looking for them: the young becoming old. Material shifting into immaterial. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.
For this project I wanted to create an exuberant, joyful, playful experience that invokes trust, connection, pleasure, and hopefulness. It has been a grueling few years for most of us. Global political unrest along with an ongoing pandemic. Basic ethics and social fairness have been on the line daily against a backdrop of environmental collapse and economic disparity. This work is a reminder of what remains good about being alive. This is part of the larger exhibition, ‘Whimsy,’ curated by Rula Jones.
This body of work started with the untimely death of a much-loved childhood friend. As I mourned her a vague memory emerged of a shadowbox-like art project she had made when we were young. To my child-self, the box was startling, magical, and beautiful (as was she, in my mind. She was just a bit older and seemed full of originality and secret knowledge). But the details of her shadowbox remain fuzzy and change every time I try to remember. I started painting a series of imagined versions of the box, inventing details that I could no longer recall. The impossibility of remembering is part of what attracts me to the undertaking, as well as the fluidity and unreliability of memory.
This painting comes from a series of work made during and reflecting on the pandemic experience.