I'm Heather and I make stuff
I'm interested in the capacity of
everything to resemble something else
One thing that's fundamental to my work
is that it exists in a state of not only
It's not only this,
but it's also this, and this, and this
So I'm usually jamming together
bits of stuff that I've hijacked
from all over the place,
where possible low-grade materials that
come from the street, from under foot,
from online, from inside the mouth,
from the stuff that gets into my ears
And all of that stuff ends up as videos,
sculptures, drawings, music,
writing, environments ...
I have no fixed starting point
Only accumulation
I keep sniffing around
checking things out like a dog,
until I get onto a good waft,
and then I just keep following it
through whatever digressions
and no go areas
Generally, I have no idea of where
I'm heading or what I'll find,
I just keep my nose to the ground
I think of my works as
all kinds of compositions,
because music is perhaps the most
fundamental part of my palette
Everything about musical structure -
its tones, pitches, rhythms, frequencies,
key changes, changes of movements,
is in my work
Often I need to sound out the tone
of the room before I start to dream into it
Like hearing music in my head
It's like my eyes also become ears,
and my feet also become ears,
and maybe my whole body is ears
The Duveen Galleries are something
resembling public space,
so I wanted to establish it as a site
for some kind of spell
And I started accumulating all these bits -
these marks and piles, and remains
that I cobbled together
into renewed forms,
using whatever resemblances I saw,
or could force -
to make all kinds of transformations,
fantasies and metamorphoses
And so they became the mutant creatures
you see now
I never like to predetermine or assume
what an audience might feel or think
Only that the experience might, somehow,
impact one's disposition
And I include myself in that,
as I'm also the audience
And I also don't know what it is
until it's walking into me,
and often I don't even know then either
But, above all, I think the one thing
that holds all my work together,
is its recurring sense of being,
or becoming alien -
continual attempts to cultivate curiosity
and strangeness,
in an attempt to get at ecstatic experience
It's a zone of increased sensuality,
and because you're squeezed
to the edges,
and things are magnified and towering,
a reminder of our smallness
How could we be anything else?