Heather Hart

Heather Hart is an installation artist who uses materials to investigate how identities are formed. Her highly crafted projects display her technique and skill as a builder who is interested in the links between people and things. For example, her work like, Uncle Julius’ Porch, is very physical, yet the solid structure incorporates music from the 1960s to recall a sense of domesticity from a particular space and time. In another work entitled The Northern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off The Mother, she constructs a rooftop that also functions as a gathering space that people access by climbing onto. She constructs porches and rooftops that elevate the body to spaces of memory and contemplation. Hart’s work is a model for generosity in the way that she creates spaces for sharing between the artist and the audience. The work needs human interaction to have meaning – without it the objects are lifeless. She is interested in the way these structures relate to identity, and aims to manipulate identity by recontextualizing materials that recall a sense of comfort or home.  Sometimes, as in the piece JuJu for the Blood, she takes on the role of the artist as spiritual purveyor, offering the audience objects that she claims elicit luck and good fortune. Other times like in the work, Barter Town, she is the architect of economic exchange, where she arranges a temporary settlement of artists who interact with the public by trading services and goods at trading posts. In this way, she is designing networks of interactions between human beings, environment, and identity.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Heather.

Images:

Uncle Julius’ Porch, 2008

The Northern Oracle: We Will Tear Roof Off the Mother, 2010

Juju for the Blood, 2010

Barter Town, 2010