Statement
I am interested in the overlap between objective and subjective experience. My work often begins with straightforward material facts or scientific data as a tool to get at more ineffable, poetic experiences that are difficult to describe, document, or categorize. Hidden infrastructures and invisible ordering mechanisms are central to my work – things like gravity, quantum physics, radio waves, but also the human body, memory, and contradictory emotions like aversion and affection. 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.
Bio
Heather Harvey is an American artist living and working on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near Washington D.C. and Baltimore, MD. Her art and teaching center around experimental, exploratory, and interdisciplinary approaches with a focus on inquiry and ethics. She works across traditional genres including painting, drawing, sculpture, and temporary site-specific work, as well as in post-studio, ephemeral approaches that include walking to collect trash, plants, debris, and other found materials. Her projects grow out of a range of interests – most often the sciences (astronomy, physics, biology, geology), philosophy, poetry, psychoanalytical perspectives, the natural world, and ethics-based social justice issues. An enduring motivation is a desire to metabolize experience and come to terms with the complex realities of being human. Recent solo exhibitions include The Thin Place, at the Academy Art Museum, in Easton, Maryland, USA; The Kitchen at 14 Rua de Santo Amaro, in Messejana, Portugal; Remake-Remodel at Salisbury University in Salisbury, MD; Periodicities of Chaotic Forcing at Second Street Gallery, in Charlottesville, VA; Encampment, at M.A.P. in Baltimore, MD. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Buinho Creative Hub, in Messejana, Portugal and Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency, in Montegiovi, Italy.
She has received received the Maryland Individual Artist Award twice (2014, 2017), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, and the MSAC $10K Independent Artist Grant in 2021. 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 currently teaches art at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, and has an upcoming residency at NARS Foundation AIR Program, Brooklyn, New York, Summer of 2023.
current Projects
I am currently working on three new bodies of work that incorporate the following interests:
Itinerant art practices and the use of temporary settings and found/handmade materials (for example making art while on the road or in less-than-ideal living spaces)
Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories about structures of the human mind, including somatic and embodied approaches, and techniques developed by psychoanalyst Carl Jung (i.e. what he called ‘active imagination’)
Two and three-dimensional mixed media works that combine subjective inner experience with more objective universal themes derived from the hard sciences, in particular astronomical observations. The operating principle for this last project is that there are microcosmic and macrocosmic analogies, or structural similarities, between one human’s experience and the cosmos as a whole. In other words, you can infer aspects of personal/subjective experience by working with aspects of objective reality and vice versa
The planned outcome for these projects is the creation a series of small- and large-scale paintings, small sculptures, and at least one room-size installation. The exact nature of the work is evolving, but I envision the three separate projects with connections to each other and to my past work. These three series will be able to stand alone as their own exhibitions, or can be exhibited together as a more all-encompassing statement.