Heidi Pollard's work approaches the dichotomies of daily life – the contradictory beliefs, feelings, and experiences we all hold in tension – with a sense of wonder and beauty. Employing her impressions and memories, she makes the unfathomable tangible in her drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Full of symbol and metaphor, her work reaches beyond her own experiences and thoughts to become something new and nameless, a mirror for the viewer.
Of this process, Pollard says, "My studio process is improvised, contemplative - a way of negotiating irreconcilables. Yet I'm an imagist, not someone who is primarily interested in process. Drawing, painting, and object construction have taught me to trust the fertile soil of the moment, and of my own perceptions … For me, drawing and painting are direct ways to negotiate just about everything."
In Heaven and Other Realms we are showing a collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant winning artist, Heidi Pollard's small oil, gouache and ink paintings. These works demonstrate the painterly nature of her work as a contemporary artist creating new forms, with a lineage to, and often bridging, important movements within art such as abstract expressionism and minimalism. Pollard's paintings become not just a negotiation between the competing realities of life, but also of those historically competing movements within the last-century history of art that are the building blocks for the diverse and multi-faceted contemporary art scene of today.
Her ink “Heaven” paintings can be seen as a painterly reinterpretation of the Modernist, and later Minimalist fascination with the grid, with a kinship to the zen-like graphite works of Agnes Martin. These paintings, which also remind one of woven fabric or basketry, relate to her experience as a sculptor working with discarded and reclaimed 3D materials and objects.
Her oil paintings combine the painterliness and emotional color of the abstract expressionists, as well as that mystic sense of “seeing” that which can not be fully seen, with familiar shapes and symbols that are recognizable. Her gouache paintings seem to capture all of these elements: painterly-rendered minimalist patterns, emotional color, and layered symbols and metaphors that the viewer finds familiar, and yet not quite definable.
For additional information, also reference her Artist page here