29 June - 24 July
Opening Saturday 2 July 4pm-6pm
Over the last few years Heather Stewart has increasingly adopted a multidisciplinary practice to find a way forward to understand how we alter and contemporize our idea of normality. The exhibition at F Project is ostensibly eclectic but united in one idea about human diversity or rather a question about how we alter our view of what is normal. The human heads and bodies are not necessarily gender specific although historical references to archetypal female imagery provide the viewer with an element of familiarity. Stewart is trying to explore how much incongruity the mind finds acceptable in order to take on new information and alter its perception of what it means to be human.
In the small sculptures, she has tried to balance the abstraction of anthropomorphic tree forms with mimetic clay heads, shoulders and sometimes feet and hands. In their entirety the visual language of all the sculptures, including the busts exhibit a disparity in colour, materiality and form, the white clay contrasting with the shellacked tree forms; clay against perspex.
The collages comprise a variety of juxtaposed images taken from popular and disparate sources; comics, magazines, tissue box designs etc. Stewart aims to marry the known with the unknown; the random with the familiar, in order to convince the viewer of the validity of the forms. Art historical references and mythological identities such as the figure of Flora, and the Greek Muses provide a stabilizing focus point and hopefully some element of aesthetic beauty.
Stewart says; Initially I wanted to reconcile the evident material disparities. At best I’ve aimed for a serendipitous co-existence of incongruence.