HeatherCareyArt Home

        I make work which deals with perception, both the psychological and the physiological sides of it. I explore the visual and imaginative possibilities of painting, taking into account the history of painting and the different languages of mark-making included in this history. I am most interested in the experiential side of visual arts, and how this experience can be influenced by our living and interacting within man-made environments. My work deals with space, constructions of reality, and choices involved in navigating through our everyday spaces.

        With this work I am showing the relationship between the world and our perception of it. I am interested in contrasting the physicality of materials (tactile information, actively interacting within the world) with pictorial representation (visual information, passively receiving the world). I hope to engage viewers in a confusing visual experience where the work remains the same, but perceptions change for the viewer, move back and forth, are unstable. Brushstrokes become figures, and perspectival lines become brushstrokes or fields of colour. This type of program denies the ‘purity’ of abstraction and the 'truth' of mimesis as ideal states for painting by demonstrating that the abstract can be representational and vice-versa. In this way the viewer may relate the paintings to images in the world, or to the real world itself. My wall paintings reveal their 2-D object-hood, while the sculptural paintings ("rocks") can also work as representations, and their positioning in a space together brings out these inner relationships within the work and its relationship to each other. Through combining abstraction with representation, representational elements help the viewer to place abstract or material elements within the space of the painting, and perhaps the canvas support structure works in the same way for the rocks.

        My working process involves a lot of learning through production. I am always thinking about the next piece, and often I play around with studies and sketches in the process of figuring out a work. I have started thinking about the choices I make and how this influences the reception of the final piece. Navigating a piece of art is somewhat like navigating the world around us, we use information already given about how things should be, and make choices about which parts of the images around us are important to acknowledge. We place ourselves in our world observing basic laws of perceptual organization such as overlap, continuous line, patterning, as well as using previous knowledge obtained about what certain combinations of these elements represent (ie. 8 sided red thing on a post is a stop-sign). I like to think about how much information is needed and what can be left out. I also like to think about to what degree there might be a collective conscious/unconscious in the viewing of art. I like to keep my spaces fairly open and generic, so that the experience of the space isn't so specific to a certain group of people.