Heather McPherson

Lives and works in Providence, RI, USA

Artist statement

In my work, devotional imagery, expressive scrawls, and psychedelic color fields are embedded in shapes of transparent epoxy. This collage-like grammar is enabled by the permissiveness of a liquid field that accepts and metabolizes any fragment; once solid, it becomes a substrate for further painting. These works’ reflective, transparent surfaces communicate like a screen or a face. They ask about transmissibility: between self and other, from body to body, across the threshold of the work’s surface. My work emphasizes depth (however shallow) of a sheet of paper: the epoxy bath brings many strata of mark-making into simultaneous presence, blurring recto and verso into one body. I look to the art histories of dreams and the mystical, efforts to envision the formless and define what ordinary vision is incapable of seeing (bodily sensation, numinous encounter, or other non-empirical strangeness). The vibrating abstract atmosphere produced in my work physicalizes such experiences. My transcriptions or grafts of sacred imagery reach towards someone else reaching towards god: I imagine Van Eyck painting each leg hair of Adam in the Ghent altarpiece, with a brush made of a single hair, and the kind of sensual and spiritual longing evinced by this repetitive gesture—painting fleshly realness is also painting transcendence—I join and take on another’s longing. This desire to merge exposes the eroticism of merged subjectivities. My work includes low relief casting of imagery and...

Artwork