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Heather Hansen
Heather Hansen - Artist's Statement
Heather Hansen offers these thoughts about her fresco work:
"Through the ancient fresco medium I aim to create contemporary and tranquil abstract works that celebrate the natural world. Fundamentally, I am interested in the elemental quality of the material itself; lime plaster, water and earth pigments, and the myriad of ways they interact. While reducing an image or an idea to its most basic form, I work to maintain its complexity by creating images that have a graphic, yet subdued, impact from a distance, but which reveal many levels of intricacy when appreciated up close.
To achieve this effect, I exploit the textural and 3–dimensional possibilities of plaster, adding colors and additional layers of plaster before selectively carving those layers away again. Each piece requires a concentrated time of arduous physical labor of mixing, troweling, carving, scraping and sanding. I try to speed up the affects of the cycle of time by putting each piece through a considerable amount of abuse to arrive at an worn and warm patina. What often emerges is the simple, yet ominous, image of a circle, a shape which holds great mystery to me.
I am particularly fascinated by the transformative cycle of the material which, in a closed-loop process, changes from stone to powder to liquid and back to solid stone again in a new configuration. The cycle of this process and the circle's shape in turn seems to direct and reflect my meditative state when immersing myself in the creation of a piece. This process, to me, lies somewhere on the threshold between sculpture and painting, science and child’s play. I often feel like an archaeologist slowly unearthing an ancient object from the future. And in the end, the circle becomes a kind of portal for the viewer."
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