In 2007 I began a project that I called A Sense of Place.  A project in which I made a commitment and a promise that I would actively and consciously engage in a practice of strengthening my relationship with the land that I lived on and the community that I was part of.  The commitment was simple; everyday I would carry a camera and I would walk through the community in which I lived.  My definition of community included my neighborhood/town and the natural world that was embedded, inseparable and interwoven with the constructed world of of our human interactions, inhabitance and the society had been built up around, through and upon it.  I carried the camera to document my adventures, what was revealed through the process, and what my eyes had been opened to that had previously gone unseen.  

I experienced and learned much in that year.  I learned about the watershed that supplied flowing life to my everyday world.  I learned about the cycle of life, birth, growth and death.  I learned of the plants and animals that I shared the geography of my existence and the world that we all knew as our home.  I learned about the impact that we curious humans have on the world around us.  I also learned that the more I became aware of the movements of the world around me, the more I knew of my own rhythm, impact  and my purpose  within it.

The "framing" of this mysterious and gorgeous world through the lens of the camera allowed me to shift my vision.  It afforded me the opportunity to slow down and see from a different perspective what on other occasions I had been moving to quickly to acknowledge, notice and see.  ​There was something exquisitely beautiful in returning to and/or passing the same giant pine tree everyday and watching as its  gorgeous, aromatic, sticky life force flowed in the spring, gummed in the summer and froze into magnificent blue, purple, white and pink crystalline structures in the arms of winter.

Interestingly enough, I do not enjoy carrying a camera when I travel to a place that is new to me or when I am a "visitor". I have a natural resistance to doing so.  The further away from where my life is centered and lived on a daily basis - when I am a "tourist" so to speak, the carrying of the camera can somehow feel rude or strangely wrong.  My eyes, being and senses are already so engaged and swimming in the multitude of new sounds and sights that the camera can feel like an unnecessary intrusion.  In these times it can feel like I begin to rely on the camera to shift my vision and only succeed in creating a distance between myself and the newness of the environment and experience.  It can also feel like I am using the cameras ability to "remember" instead of my own.  I travelled to New Mexico twice a year for 5 years and completely moved my life there before I ever took a photo of that land.  

​However...in the place that I inhabit, in the place that I rely upon as a daily source of my existence; the camera becomes a pause and a shift in the way that I can see.  It is an opening and an invitation to the world around me.  I am called to notice, to see differently, to not take for granted what surrounds me as a result of the regularity with which I pass by and/or my familiarity with it.   

I have now been living in my current home and location for  little under 6 months.  I have once again found myself carrying a camera for the same reasons I did in 2007.  The reason or intention that I am engaging in the process is the same as it was ten years ago.  It is the process itself that is now slightly different.  Technology sure has come a long way in the last 10 years.

​After taking an initial photograph I do a very similar process as the one involved in the creation of my paintings.  I "shift" aspects of the image; altering qualities of light, hue, distortion, inversion, contrast, etc.  I think of the process and its actions as a series of doors.  One door opens to reveal the next - each door revealing what had been previously unnoticeable  or unseen to my eyes.  

In Gratitude, Love and Art,
​~Heather

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There is a space and time that exists only before the first rays of the rising sun can be felt and seen.  This is when I wake.  It is the pause before the world starts to stir.  It is the pause in which what has come in the blanket of the night begins to turn and retreat into the richness of the shadows.  It is the space  before the stillness has been broken.  This is when I most fully know myself.  This is when I am most able to hear, see and touch my soul.  This is when I consciously engage in communion with the source of my existence.

Prior to August of this year, I had experienced a period of time with a multitude of major life transitions.  Throughout this period much of who I had known myself to be was called into question.  The voice of my Mother as she prepared to leave this earthly plane formed swirling eddies out of what had  been flowing rivers in my identity and psyche.  Her words and thoughts of who I was or was not swirled with all of the other changes that had so recently occurred. I found myself struggling to hold on to who I had conceived and believed myself to be.  Time and life continued to move in an erratic and previously unknown way over the next six months.  There was no "normal".  There was no getting back to "normal".  Normal would never again be what normal once was.  

​I found myself and my identity being furthered called into question by the relationship that I had begun ten months prior to my Mother's passing.  The truth is that I was not who I had been before.  The truth is I was exhausted; physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  I needed time.  I needed space to sit with the parts of me that remained.  I needed time to grieve the loss of the parts of me that no longer knew their own name.  I needed to enter the silence and sort through the rubble.  When asked to prove that I was still who I once had proclaimed myself to be; I could not, for I was not.  The relationship ended and I began. 

In those early morning hours, before the light reveals the day, I began the long walk home.  Who was I when I was stripped bare?  Who was I when I turned off the cacophony of sound, stimulus and opinions of the world and those who believed that they knew me?  Who was I when I stood naked in the mirror and saw myself through my own eyes and the eyes of my Creator?  Could I dissolve my own entrapment?  Could I set myself free and welcome the form that I would take?  In solitude, could I reach into myself and find my truth, my beauty and my soul?  

​In the solitude I found myself to be spiritually pregnant.  Once again I began to hear that music, the hidden song  that my soul was revealing.   A deep and lavish richness is gathering within me and within my hands.  It is from this palette that I shall paint.

In Gratitude, Love & Art,
​~Heather

I am not who I once was. I am who I have always been.

Those of you who know me on a personal level have probably on occasion heard me say, "both of these things are true simultaneously".

A few days ago a strong storm came through where I live. I woke up feeling like the storm that had passed through during the night had somehow become part of my internal landscape; a disturbance of the normal condition of the atmosphere, manifesting itself by winds of unusual force or direction. Throughout my life there have been periods of time when I have been deeply aware that I am in the middle of a significant transformational shift. I believe that for the most part we are all in a constant change/state of transformation (if we so choose, welcome and allow). What feels poignant about certain periods of transformation is my level of awareness regarding the shift that is occurring.

I could feel the storm inside me. I could feel it changing, rearranging, cleansing, and breaking previously constructed parts of my identity. I cannot say it is a comfortable feeling. It can be rather unsettling, especially when the feeling is particularly strong. It feels like an electrical storm deep in my core. I have had similar experiences before but this felt different. I believe the difference lied within the sharp level of my awareness regarding the significance and impact of my choices on where this transformation would lead.

​What did I wish to leave behind? What was no longer mine to carry? What had I forgotten and sat aside that I needed to be willing to pick back up and walk with? What parts of me had formed around others beliefs about who I am or who I should be? Could the storm that I am feeling assist me in shaking loose what was not solid and core? Could it move away debris and reveal what is strong, rooted and growing inside of me? There has been one other time in my life when this feeling came on with such intensity. I started pouring through my journals to try and connect the pieces. Eureka! I found it. It was 10 years ago and it was one of the most prolific years of my life and artistic practice. It was also when I was working on a piece that I called Remembered Pieces.

​Interestingly enough, I never considered this piece completed. It had always been my intention and desire to construct a room out of the panels of canvases. A room that when constructed would create a universe and beyond.
​

A Prayer of Re-membered Pieces

Beyond the Veil of my human existence
deep in the Ancient Womb
where the creative Soil is rich with the dust of a galaxy of Stars

I Cry out to the Divine

on tears formed from the Waters that rise and fall in my body
rhythm takes form and my Soul begins to Sing

I am a song of Re-membered Pieces

my Humanity
aches
to know
to touch
to contact
to remember
my Divinity

the Call is returned, whispered on the Winds
moving the delicate strands of the Web
with the echo and reverberation of the Voices of the Holies

I Cry out to the Divine

on Winds formed from the direction and intention of my Breath
Life takes form and is carried from one Being to the next

I am a Story of Re-Membered Pieces

my Divinity
aches
to know
to touch
to contact
to Re-member
my Humanity

buried deep within this Temple of Skin, Bone and Flesh
a powerful medicine is known
cooked by the Fire that in its hunger devours all illusion

I Cry out to the Divine

Mountains and Valleys sculpted by the heat and movement of my Blood
a landscape of great Beauty and forgotten history

I am a body of Re-Membered Pieces

my Humanity
aches
 to know
to touch
to contact
 to remember
my Divinity

on the other side of the mirrored Looking glass
the Eyes of the Snake are clouded
preparations are being made to Shed its Skin and cross between the realms

I Cry out to the Divine

milk of transmutation moving, warmed by swelling breast and beating Heart
nourishment crossing the physical Boundary of skin

I am only part of the Re-membered pieces

my Divinity
aches
to know
to touch
to contact
to remember
my Humanity

Worlds touch
contact occurs
the interface is Created
the Veil shimmers and the illusion falters
Re-Membered Pieces merging in a Symphony of sound and color

I Cry out to the Divine

​All Life Answers