Heather Lee Birdsong
Posted by petra.sairanen
Heather Lee Birdsong, Hopeful Things in Dark Places No. 2, Flashe paint, charcoal, glow-in-the-dark pigment, gum arabic, acrylic on translucent polypropylene, Original dimensions 38″ x 25″, 2024
The Need for Kindness
- Dates: September 19 – October 23, 2024
- Artist talk and gallery reception: October 15, 11am – 1pm
- Gallery hours:
- Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
- Saturdays by appointment (free parking)
My paintings and prints arise from efforts to understand “home” as a physical place, separate from and alongside “home” as a feeling of belonging. Scenes coalesce from places often no longer accessible to me—such as places I once lived, left behind through expired leases or estrangement—and closely observed landscapes. The geometric figures inhabiting these scenes represent people, abstracted into how someone feels in my mind, rather than what they look like.
Perhaps because buildings seem transient to me, I locate my sense of place in the landscapes around them more than in their architecture. The temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest that I now call home, and the desert of the American Southwest where I grew up, feature prominently, and often get mixed together. Whether a particular plant is native, introduced, or invasive is both allegorical and illustrative of human-caused environmental change.
The history of American landscape painting is largely one of erasure—illusions of pastoral harmony or untouched wilderness. Landscape, in my life and my work, is something that exists between buildings, outside windows, along managed trails, in fairy tales, shaped around or for human activity (and in the American west, often violent histories). I deliberately interrupt illusionistic space with flatness: silhouettes, hard-edged geometric figures, opaque paints (primarily gouache and Flashe), and sharp shadows that draw attention to the artificiality of drawn perspective.
The long shadow (and the underlying violence of the western United States) takes on particular prominence and meaning in National Sacrifice Area. The title was Corbin Harney’s term for the Nevada Test Site, where my grandfather worked on nuclear bomb development. Harney was a Newe spiritual healer who established the anti-nuclear Shundahai Network, and I participated in their protest activities in the early 2000’s. Nuclear bombardment caused irreparable harm to the Nevada desert—land that has never legally belonged to the government, per the Treaty of Ruby Valley—and a trillion tons of irradiated groundwater seeps inexorably, albeit slowly, toward increasingly dry towns and cities.
In the Hopeful Things in Dark Places series, I paint on both sides of a translucent sheet of synthetic paper. The haze of this material is like the distance created by imperfect memory or dissociation. The architecture, which is entirely painted on the backside of the sheet, are rooms recreated from memory of the house I lived in as an adolescent. The archways are portals to Forest Park, which abutted an apartment I lived in until the pandemic began. Those scenes, created with a mix of charcoal powder and Blue Lit pigment, glow in the dark, in homage to the late artist Julie Green.
I often derive titles from literary sources, including: poems by Joanne de Longchamps, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, as well as fairy tales.
About the artist
Heather Lee Birdsong (b. 1984 in Spring Valley, Nevada) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon since 2005. She serves on the Northwest Art Council committee at the Portland Art Museum and is a member of Carnation Contemporary, an artist-run, non-commercial exhibition space. In addition to her fine art practice, she works as a freelance graphic designer, editor, and arts administrator. Collections housing her artwork include the Visual Chronicle of Portland, Oregon; Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College; Albert Solheim Library, Pacific Northwest College of Art; and Southern Graphics Council International. Birdsong is recipient of project and professional development grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (2023, 2022, 2014) and was an artist-in-residence in Print Arts Northwest’s Emerging Printmakers Program (2012). She holds a BFA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2011). She was gallery manager at UPFOR from 2013 to 2020, and communications designer at Chambers@916 from 2010 to 2013.