Heidi Norton

Heidi Norton writes the following about her work:

If all continued to grow and grow, if there were no death, the world would be monstrous. My father wrote a home remedy on a piece of paper in 1977, the year I was born. It was folded and pressed like a dried-up flower in a Fox Fire book he sent me in the mail. It spoke of cobwebs, bacon, and muslin, a supposed natural remedy for a wound made by a rusty nail. A year after I received the note, I showed it to him and he refused to believe he wrote it. My parent’s past went missing; they wrote their own self-mythology, retrospectively, using time and space to distance themselves from their previous life as homesteaders. My work is in part an attempt to reclaim their time lost. Through the mediums of photography, sculpture, and painting, my work speaks to the instability and liminality of time, while investigating ideas of preservation through material and modes of display.

Plants and light become the primary mediums, as does glass, resin, wax and detritus (literally dirt from my studio floor). The plants act as a metaphor for larger, macro ideas of nature and its ecological cycles—of its impermanence and futility. Houseplants are encased, pressed, or "frozen" using materials that speak directly to histories of preservation. Light and its phenomenological (via the viewing experience) and physical effect, go hand in hand. The silver halide crystals of a photograph can trap light, just as the photoreceptors of a plant absorb light during photosynthesis. As the plants move through ecological spans of time, the works' physical form expands and compresses.

Heidi Norton (American, lives NYC) is an artist and writer whose 1970’s upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life and nature. She received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected exhibitions include the Wave Hill NY, Lubeznik Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Elmhurst Art Museum, Northeastern Illinois University, Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Sargent's Daughters NY, GRIMM Gallery NY, the Knitting Factory NY, Chicago Cultural Center, La Box Gallery National School of Art France. Her writing and work are included in Artnews, Art21, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Journal for Artistic Research, Grafts by Michael Marder, Why Look at Plants ed. by Giovanni Aloi, among others. She is founder and director of Vantage Points, an art education and portfolio development service geared towards helping students of all ages develop their artistic practice.