"Strange Plants"

This is the sixth volume of Working On Gallery Guest Editor Series. Luisa A. Igloria was my guest during the pandemic year. Since then, Igloria and I have collaborated on projects including Celebrating AAPI Writers and Creatives: Reading and Panel by the Muse Writers Center. It is absolutely fantastic to work with her.

Igloria introduced me to Heather Beardsley, and I immediately got interested in her projects. 

"I hope that my work can take root in viewers’ imagination and open up their way of thinking about our relationship to the environment and the ecological crises we're facing." - - ​Heather Beardsley​

I strongly recommend visiting ​Beardsley​'s website. Her current projects and creative processes are talked about in this interview, and also, she has sculpture and fiber projects along with her YouTube videos on her website. They are all inspirational.

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Working On Gallery​ Past Guest Editors:
Meg Reynolds

• "MR: Who are you making this for? mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself."
• ​"Writing and Unwriting: The Asemic Work of Karla Van Vliet"

​​​Francesca Preston

• “I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

• INFINITE DEMAND: Brazilian Artist - Marcelo Sahea
• "Almost a Poem": Brazilian Artist - Angela Quinto

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Strange Plants, Videos

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Artist Interview
​Heather Beardsley

By Luisa A. Igloria

Interviewer: Luisa A. Igloria

Originally from Baguio, Philippines, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), co-winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask, winner of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize.

In 2015, Igloria was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. A Louis I. Jaffe Professor and a professor of English and creative writing, she teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009 to 2015. Igloria also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and was appointed as the poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2020. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

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Luisa A. Igloria:

Heather Beardsley was born in Virginia Beach, VA. She received a BA in History and Art from the University of Virginia in 2009 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

Heather was granted a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art in Vienna, Austria for the 2015-2016 academic year. She has exhibited work throughout the United States and Europe, including in New York, Chicago, Austria, Germany, Slovakia and the UK. In 2016, she was awarded a twelve-month Braunschweig Projects International Artist Scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany in affiliation with the Braunschweig University of Art. Recent exhibitions include Department Of at the Braunschweig University of Art, Books Undone: The Art of Altered Books at The Gallery at Penn College, and Strange Plants at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk VA.

Besides these achievements, last year she worked with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art to expand on a project they commissioned for the exhibition More Than Shelter. For this project, she made a series of bee hotels that are meant to support the native bee population in this area. This new stage of the project will work on trying to build stronger empathy and consideration of native species in the area by drawing on the folklore tradition of telling the bees about important events happening in one's life or with one's family. This will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Arts in summer 2024.

Heather Beardsley

In the fall of 2023, Heather started teaching in the Art Department at Old Dominion University, and is excited to explore additional opportunities through the university’s partnership with the Chrysler Museum’s Perry Glass Studio.
 
I had the good fortune to meet and hear Heather during the artist talk she gave at the opening of Strange Plants, a beautiful and uncanny meditation on the relationships between the human, built, and natural environments. (Coincidentally, I had worked with her brother James as his thesis director just before his graduation from the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.) At her talk, Heather spoke of how much of the work developed for Strange Plants came out of residencies abroad, and how she needed a form to work in that was both portable and accessible.

Besides these considerations, I asked Heather about other influences on the decision to work in these ways— mingling multimedia collage, photography, tourism, and embroidery, among other things.   ​

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Strange Plants, Animations

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Heather Beardsley:​

I've had a fascination with process and material exploration since I did my MFA in the Fibers and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. What attracted me to that program was the focus on how the process and material of a work can be used to reinforce the concept. Since graduating, I always try to think about how my material and technical choices can add new layers of meaning to the final piece.
 
When it comes to the Strange Plants series, the range of media has continued to grow over the 5-year period I’ve been working on it. It started out pretty simple, by drawing on found photographs with gel pens and making miniature sculptures in matchboxes using air dry clay and photos taken from books. Part of what has kept me so engaged in this project for so long has been that I keep finding new techniques for expanding the visual language.

​When I started, I really thought this project would be limited to the three-month residency I was doing in Budapest. Towards the end of that residency, I did my first experiments sewing plants onto photographs taken from books, and that was something I wanted to continue exploring. Over time, sewing into photographs became easy for me and I started looking for new ways to challenge myself.

Visiting Kyiv in 2019 for another residency, I was inspired by the traditional textile work that is an important part of Ukrainian culture. I found hand-embroidered linens at street markets, and began to experiment with ways of combining architectural photography with traditional handcraft.

​My work has an interesting relationship between the digital and analog. I do incorporate certain digital processes into my work, but often find ways to complicate them and reinsert my hand back into the process in very tedious and time-consuming ways. Combining traditional handwork techniques with the mechanical process of photography from glossy architecture books was something that felt natural. It wasn't until later that I started to ask questions about why this made sense to me.

Perhaps it was partly a desire to expand on how people view floral and plant embroidery (generally dismissed as being ‘decorative’ art). In my work, I make images using techniques and an aesthetic tied to femininity in Western culture and make these more dominant in contrast to monumental architecture made of stone, concrete, steel, and glass.  
 
I don't know that I see my work as directly engaging with the idea of tourism—although I suppose there are a lot of environmental concerns wrapped up in that, with many historic and natural sites struggling to balance the desire for tourists to visit with the inherent degradation that comes with it. The cities I include in the series are places where I have spent a decent amount of time, feeling somewhat embedded in the culture. Using the photographs calls attention to how architecture and urban design are so ubiquitous that we often aren't consciously thinking about how they form our ideology and our sense of how society should function.

​Through travel, I can see how the architecture of a society often represents its values, governmental systems, and history,  and how those things intertwine. Being conscious of how our built environment can inform our ideology is crucial to understanding how we can change that ideology in the face of environmental crises.

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"Strange Plants, Boxes" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

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Why do you love working in the media that you do? Do you have a favorite?

Beardsley:
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I don't think I have a favorite media on its own; it works well for me to switch between media. I have a need to do intricate work with my hands. It’s a common thread that runs through all the media I work with.

​Working in a detailed, focused way helps me think more clearly about thematic elements, while also allowing me to lose myself in the process of making. When I'm very busy with the other demands of my career and I don’t have a lot of time in the studio, I can feel a tension building within me, drawing me back to making. My hands get fidgety while I'm sitting and doing administrative tasks. I definitely need to carve out studio time to feel like a healthy whole human.

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Can you talk about your typical process for working, on both smaller scale and larger scale pieces? 

Beardsley:

​I start with an idea in my head, I don't do a lot of sketching at this point with this series. Perhaps as a result of working with the same idea for so long, a lot of times once I know the basic elements of a piece, like the dimensions of a 3D print or a composition of a photo, I get a pretty clear picture in my head of what I want the piece to look like. After that I work intuitively.

​The basic parameters remain the same but each stitch or blade of grass is in response to what has been put in place before. I often treat small pieces as palate cleansers, sprinkled along the way to finishing larger, more time-consuming pieces. Sometimes I just need to sit down with a small photograph that I can finish in a couple hours. This helps with the delayed satisfaction, sometimes months delayed, of working on a larger scale. I am accustomed to working on as many as five pieces simultaneously, in different media and at different stages of production.
 
The older I get, the better understanding I have of what works best for me. In the past, especially when I was in school settings, there was a lot of pressure to work on one piece at a time to completion. Now I have more control over my timelines, and through several art residencies I’ve gained insight on what keeps me engaged and productive. This means my process involves working on multiple things simultaneously. They're at different points, so if I'm tired I can jump into something that is at a pure execution point and not just lose that time or risk messing up a project.

"Strange Plants, Embroidered Photographs" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

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Do you think there has been any significant change or turn in the direction of your work, and what has influenced that (and has living through this pandemic also affected you and your work)?

Beardsley:
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​The pandemic has certainly had an impact as well. As you noted earlier, for so long a lot of my material choices were dictated by the fact that I was living a nomadic lifestyle. My work needed to be able to be packed into suitcases and brought with me on trains and planes around the world. Being rooted in one place for 2020 and 2021, while not by choice, did allow me the opportunity to increase the scale of my work in a way I had been wanting to for quite some time.

​It also gave me time to incorporate new media into the series that had interested me for a while. I never had the time in my schedule to learn the necessary skills before. Suddenly, without any exhibitions or travel, time opened up so I learned how to create embroidery animations in Photoshop, and edit videos and mix sound in Final Cut Pro. Introducing time-based media into the series had been a big goal: getting to watch the growth of my works is a key element of how I experience them and I had been searching for a way to translate that for people looking at my work after it's completed.

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I see many of your pieces in Strange Plants as interested in themes of time and space, the temporal and the infinite, natural and man-made environments, the miniature or intimate/private, and the expansive or public. Can you talk a little bit about these ideas and how your art gives you opportunities to embody them?

Beardsley:
​
Those are definitely things that I'm thinking about. Both photography and architecture create communication across generations. Our understanding of times that came before us is informed by the images and buildings that remain. I work with a lot of found materials; the images I draw and sew on are taken from second-hand books, many of them quite old. Using vintage photographs while portraying scenes that we haven't seen yet is a way for me to disrupt people's interpretation of time, and consider their place in it. What will we communicate to future generations through the structures we build today? Are we demonstrating an acknowledgment of the problems those generations will face, or are we thinking short-term about what's cheapest or easiest for now? There's a contradiction there that I seek to exploit with my work.
 
Often our conversations about the environment treat it as something outside of humans. The reality is, like all living creatures, we cannot live outside of the environment. Unlike other living organisms, we have been able to massively shape and reshape our environment. but that doesn't change the fact that all organisms are present in an environment. By integrating nature into built environments, I want people to consider not only how our history of industrialization is disrupting ecosystems and biodiversity on an unprecedented level, but to challenge the very dichotomy of man and nature.

​My sculptures and images are meant to inspire ideas for how nature can be brought back into the natural environment, or how new structures can better consider the native ecosystems in their designs. The problems we are facing as a species are global and at a macro scale. They can be hard to process or feel optimistic about. Working on a smaller, more intimate scale, I hope will help make some thinking about these issues more accessible and less overwhelming. Our mind and body relates to miniature work in a different way— there’s a captivation with miniature versions of larger things. My miniature sculptures invite this fascination, using it to engage with topics that might otherwise feel overwhelming. 
 
Embroidery and other kinds of handwork are still tied to historical ideas of domesticity and femininity. They are often regarded as craft media instead of fine art in Western culture because they were traditionally made by women, daughters, and mothers, working together in the privacy of the home rather than by men working in a studio. I am seeking to reconceptualize the second-hand textiles I collage and add embroidery to. When I find them in flea markets or thrift stores, they certainly are not regarded as fine art, but after I’ve altered, framed, and hung them in an art space, this work that was done by anonymous women is now regarded in a new way. I see these as collaborations, and a way of acknowledging this kind of work as being just as valid as others. 

"Strange Plants, Dollhouse" by Heather Beardsley. Photo by Ed Pollard.

EXPLORE THIS PROJECT

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What do you hope for viewers to experience in your work?

Beardsley:
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I hope that my work can take root in viewers’ imagination and open up their way of thinking about our relationship to the environment and the ecological crises we're facing. I don't want there to be one answer or takeaway that someone leaves the work with. I'm more interested in generating questions and feelings that can then grow on their own in ways I couldn’t anticipate.

​I believe a lot of what needs to change is our overall thinking about why nature is important and what is the best way for us to relate to it. The minutiae of specific solutions or steps to take won't be enough if our overall mindset doesn't change. I hope my work can spark something in the imagination that can develop in completely new and unexpected ways. If future generations grow up with a completely different view of what we owe to other species, they'll be in a much better place to implement changes and solutions.

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​When you're not making art, what do you like to do? What's up ahead?

Beardsley:
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​Honestly, I don't have a great work life balance—I’m definitely a workaholic! There's so much I need to do administratively to support my career, in addition to the teaching I need to do to supplement my income. At times both of those can feel like full-time jobs. Then I still need to find time to actually make my work, a lot of which is also incredibly time-consuming. For now that's what I feel like I have to do to accomplish my goals.

​I hope in the future I am able to strike more of a balance. It would be wonderful to be in a position to outsource a lot of the administrative work, and to teach on a more part-time basis. But I love that having a home studio means I get to hang out with my dog while I'm working. She and I take walks together every day, and her regular sleep schedule has helped me maintain my own and take better care of myself.

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