As a figurative painter, Heather’s work is firmly rooted in the broader tradition of representational art. She works predominantly in oils, and her recent works are composed with the aim to be unsettling in their format.
Through the use of photography and collected media images, she gathers fragments of gesture that often happen by chance. She then uses these fragments to create paintings of figures that are defined by their social situations. There is a sense of familiarity in her work that is derived from impulses rooted in memory, and her concentration on the human form reflects on her attachment to life as a child, woman and artist, living and growing up in Somerset.
Her compositions are drawn from sources as diverse as fashion magazines and specific paintings from art history (Nicolas Poussin’s triptych The Triumph of Pan and William Hogarth’s A Rakes Progress have both been sources of inspiration); others are mainly inventions that merge aspects from both. Her deliberately disintegrating painting style, spontaneous brushwork and use of blood red paint, distorts the familiar figurative elements.
Heather’s work is harnessing the symbolic and emotional potential of gesture in every day situations. She is also illustrating the conflict of reality encroaching on the socially imposed myths of female worth.
“When I paint I am exploring the double nature of gesture, its silencing and its relevance for truth, because the gestures that are being made by the figures in my paintings are silencing a truth. We are living in an age that has lost its gesture because the meaning behind our gestures is no longer relevant, but in certain social situations, where we feel awkward or uncomfortable, we attempt to re-appropriate them.
“The titles I choose are to create a dialogue between the viewer and the image and as I paint, the works which emerge are negotiating the difficult contested border between words and images. However, when I show my paintings, I am happy if the viewer takes from them whatever they will.”