Bio
CV
Statement
As an artist, I am deeply concerned about the impact that human consumption and waste have on our environment. My work centers around the transformation of discarded vinyl advertising banners into works of art that reveal a connection between our consumption habits and the environmental waste we leave behind.
Each banner holds its own cultural history and significance, and my goal is to capture and communicate that history through my art. Using meticulous hand-cutting techniques, I fracture the initial image of the banner, disrupting its central intent and repurposing it into something new. The colors and shapes of the banners are sorted and brought together to create weavings, collages, or three-dimensional wall sculptures. The final piece often bears little resemblance to the original banner, having been transformed into a complex abstract shape with a unique color scheme.
Through my art, I strive to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action. I believe that art has the power to transcend language and cultural barriers, and can communicate complex issues in a way that is both accessible and thought-provoking. My hope is that my art will encourage viewers to reflect on their own consumption habits and consider the impact of their actions on the environment.
Thank you for considering my work.
CV
Statement
As an artist, I am deeply concerned about the impact that human consumption and waste have on our environment. My work centers around the transformation of discarded vinyl advertising banners into works of art that reveal a connection between our consumption habits and the environmental waste we leave behind.
Each banner holds its own cultural history and significance, and my goal is to capture and communicate that history through my art. Using meticulous hand-cutting techniques, I fracture the initial image of the banner, disrupting its central intent and repurposing it into something new. The colors and shapes of the banners are sorted and brought together to create weavings, collages, or three-dimensional wall sculptures. The final piece often bears little resemblance to the original banner, having been transformed into a complex abstract shape with a unique color scheme.
Through my art, I strive to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action. I believe that art has the power to transcend language and cultural barriers, and can communicate complex issues in a way that is both accessible and thought-provoking. My hope is that my art will encourage viewers to reflect on their own consumption habits and consider the impact of their actions on the environment.
Thank you for considering my work.
Shelley Heffler- Charting Conditions in the Anthropocene
By Peter Frank
“…[T]he notion of place and location remains temporal and mutable,” writes Shelley Heffler, giving context to her engagement of maps – and the process of mapping – in her work. Like so many artists, Heffler has responded deeply to the aesthetic pleasures of cartography, and has made maps, mapping, and the qualities of charting ground and situation a central aspect of her work. Unlike so many artists – certainly painters – Heffler has taken up the making and the consideration of maps as much as a signal to the world as a celebration of it.
To be sure, many artists who engage maps are concerned, even preoccupied, with the declining condition of the terrestrial environment. For the most part, however, they employ maps as supportive documents, or at most icons of information – notational stand-ins for the real spaces they chart – so that the visual particulars of the maps presented recede into the presentation of information. Heffler, committed to painting and to a personalized, even internalized notion of abstraction, brings forward those particulars. Or, rather, she brings forward the condition of such particularity, making her work a place where her impulse to abstraction meets the factuality of cartography. Impulse and factuality both are bolstered in her art by the additional fact that the process of translating place and location to corresponding marks on a plane is itself a process of abstraction.
A crucial part of Heffler’s approach is to give heft and texture, not just line and color, to her invented maps. A good portion of her work – notably the “Altered Hybrid” paintings – consists as much of three-dimensional construction as it does of two-dimensional rendition. And even the physically flat paintings, most recently the “Maps of the Imagination” and ”Anthropocene Art,” infer a material presence as much off as on the canvas. The Anthropocene works conjure a vivid topography, as much by the cartography-like inscriptions Heffler has imposed on them as by the articulated grounds – mountainous or effluvial, according to the palette and the movement of pigment – at their base. The “Maps of the Imagination,” by contrast, strongly suggest urban densities, webbed as they are with lines inscribed as much according to underlying grids as to the flow of paint. The Anthropocene artworks infer the imprint humans make on the earth; the Maps of the Imagination infer the accretion of imprints humans make on themselves.
Shelley Heffler’s evocation of ecological unease is just that, an evocation. It asks us to look at what we are doing to our surroundings – and thus ourselves – by communicating through abstract gesture, however carefully calibrated, the depth and persistence of our insult. The agitation of Heffler’s painterly touch does not simply bespeak her own angst in the face of climate change, but brings to immediate awareness a sense of environmental degradation, almost as if that degradation were playing itself out on the canvas, before our eyes. By the same token, the gravity of Heffler’s work calls attention to the work itself as art; these paintings are graphically, coloristically, and texturally compelling as paintings, their coarse and furious beauty never far from the surface. It is, finally, the earth’s beauty shining through – and the matching beauty of hope, hope that humankind’s wisdom can overtake its profligacy.
May 2017
Aschaffenburg, Germany
By Peter Frank
“…[T]he notion of place and location remains temporal and mutable,” writes Shelley Heffler, giving context to her engagement of maps – and the process of mapping – in her work. Like so many artists, Heffler has responded deeply to the aesthetic pleasures of cartography, and has made maps, mapping, and the qualities of charting ground and situation a central aspect of her work. Unlike so many artists – certainly painters – Heffler has taken up the making and the consideration of maps as much as a signal to the world as a celebration of it.
To be sure, many artists who engage maps are concerned, even preoccupied, with the declining condition of the terrestrial environment. For the most part, however, they employ maps as supportive documents, or at most icons of information – notational stand-ins for the real spaces they chart – so that the visual particulars of the maps presented recede into the presentation of information. Heffler, committed to painting and to a personalized, even internalized notion of abstraction, brings forward those particulars. Or, rather, she brings forward the condition of such particularity, making her work a place where her impulse to abstraction meets the factuality of cartography. Impulse and factuality both are bolstered in her art by the additional fact that the process of translating place and location to corresponding marks on a plane is itself a process of abstraction.
A crucial part of Heffler’s approach is to give heft and texture, not just line and color, to her invented maps. A good portion of her work – notably the “Altered Hybrid” paintings – consists as much of three-dimensional construction as it does of two-dimensional rendition. And even the physically flat paintings, most recently the “Maps of the Imagination” and ”Anthropocene Art,” infer a material presence as much off as on the canvas. The Anthropocene works conjure a vivid topography, as much by the cartography-like inscriptions Heffler has imposed on them as by the articulated grounds – mountainous or effluvial, according to the palette and the movement of pigment – at their base. The “Maps of the Imagination,” by contrast, strongly suggest urban densities, webbed as they are with lines inscribed as much according to underlying grids as to the flow of paint. The Anthropocene artworks infer the imprint humans make on the earth; the Maps of the Imagination infer the accretion of imprints humans make on themselves.
Shelley Heffler’s evocation of ecological unease is just that, an evocation. It asks us to look at what we are doing to our surroundings – and thus ourselves – by communicating through abstract gesture, however carefully calibrated, the depth and persistence of our insult. The agitation of Heffler’s painterly touch does not simply bespeak her own angst in the face of climate change, but brings to immediate awareness a sense of environmental degradation, almost as if that degradation were playing itself out on the canvas, before our eyes. By the same token, the gravity of Heffler’s work calls attention to the work itself as art; these paintings are graphically, coloristically, and texturally compelling as paintings, their coarse and furious beauty never far from the surface. It is, finally, the earth’s beauty shining through – and the matching beauty of hope, hope that humankind’s wisdom can overtake its profligacy.
May 2017
Aschaffenburg, Germany