Heidi Pollard

Artist's Statement

We all operate in a realm of poetic flux, to put it poetically.  We are asked daily to reconcile events, feelings and perceptions, which seem contradictory, mutually repellent or simply impossible to hold at the same time.  Like living and dying, for instance.  For me, drawing and painting are direct ways to negotiate just about everything.  Many of the shapes that I deploy in paintings first appear in slightly different versions as small drawings.  I do the drawings as improvisatory meditations and often notice that the little emblems I make could function as generally as familiar symbols.  At the same time they have the specificity of something new and nameless.  A powerful ghost-thing, a metaphor, will sometimes arise when sounds, smells, colors, definitions are rubbed together in surprising ways.  This apparition hovers over its embracing parents, present in the form of an overtone, jarring or delicate or something else entirely, depending on the ingredients.   It’s a good studio day when an image speaks that way.

Artist's Bio

In addition to CUE, Pollard has been an artist-in-residence at St. Michael’s College, VT and Headlands Center for the Arts, CA. She has received numerous painting fellowships across the United States from New Jersey State Council on the Arts; Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL; and Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY.  In 2003, she was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.  Pollard has exhibited her work in various locations throughout the country including P.S. 122, New York, NY; Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; New Mexico State University, Tyler School of Art and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA.

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