Press Excerpts
For Heather Harvey history is more like a natural phenomenon, sweeping everything equally behind it with the forces of disorder and decay. Her sculptures and paintings express certain fundamental characteristics of social order such as networks, mapping, human agency, and the inevitability of change. Yet, departing from the scientific, analytic preoccupations. . .Harvey is interested now in the more poetic and oblique resonances of the material and social record.
—From Lawrence Rinder’s exhibition essay for Beneath, Behind
Equally evocative is the work of Heather Harvey. . . Harvey's plaster, wax and fiberglass works draw most of their inspiration, not to mention strength, from pure color. Yet it's their evocation of something not just liquid but suffused with light that makes these paintings succeed. It's not for nothing that one's called "Sky Pour."
—From Washington Post review by Michael O'Sullivan
Heather Harvey’s sculptural paintings mimic the curves and hollows of the human, with our tastes of iron and salt, our smells of sweat and weather. Following the curvature of Harvey’s work, a viewer feels active in both flesh and fissure—what Albers called necessary negativa, the space between two fingers. To paint atoms as well as the humming space between them is to feel and to see with the whole soul.
—From “Re-generating Josef Albers,” by Jennifer Cognard-Black
Blithely disrupting the politely pristine white space, Harvey attacks the conventions of gallery art head-on with these restive protrusions. Defying the logic of architecture, they anxiously push their way into existence, taking shape but not quite formed. They are like ideas you can't quite get into focus or perhaps thoughts you'd rather not think. A peculiar range of meanings arises. While these uneasy forms can be seen as physical manifestations of the kind of internal, intuitive forces that knot your stomach or thrill your nerves, they are also a kind of protest against the forces of the art market. Fused with the sacrosanct walls of the gallery itself, they can't be moved, so they can't be sold. Born within the structure of the art experience, they can't be separated out as commodities.
—From review of What Comes Later by Mary McCoy
Strong artistic vision, joyful aesthetic presence, unique material choice and intriguing creative process. . . Harvey’s dynamic installations are composed of litter she finds during long walks on the Eastern shore of Maryland. Her creative process begins at that point of sourcing artistic materials from the discarded fragments of other people’s lives. It is a post-modern alchemical process, a transmutation of trash to treasure. Objects collected are sometimes readily identifiable while others remain mysterious and confounding, which adds a sense of excitement and wonderment. Harvey builds her works on site, making them at once unique, site-specific and acutely conscientious of the space in which she builds in. Her installation considers corners, planes and the natural and artificial light in the space. Harvey entwines objects, at times securely as well as haphazardly, allowing for objects to fall freely to the ground to the same position in which they were first discovered during her walks, bringing the process full circle.
—From the Whimsy curatorial statement by Rula Jones
Using gallery walls as the very medium she manipulates—by building up and layering with plaster or scraping, sanding, and puncturing, her sculpture embeds itself in the skin of the perimeters of the space. Her choice for the exhibition title demonstrates the deliberate incongruity and elusiveness evoked by her work. Two walls facing each other seem to have been kneaded and coaxed into seamless ripples, rainwater splashes, or undulating, concentric circles [that] render the hard surface of the institutional wall pliant and billowing under our gaze or nearly heaving and stabbing the air with shaped plaster as if the wall were slinging toward the viewer portions of its yielding self. The artist uses an approach that feels both aggressive and delicate.
—From Fractious Happy curatorial statement by Carina Evangelista
Heather Harvey uses discarded materials to comment on the state of the country. Part 1 of her installation is composed of junk and cheap products suggesting we are at a moment in America when things have blown apart. Political polarization, hubris, deceit, and arrogance are expressed through waste products: countless objects carelessly discarded are stripped of original meaning and become a metaphor for the overwhelming absurdist news feed that flies at us 24/7. Part 2 of the installation offers a host of alternative options: escape, community and grassroots efforts, creativity, and growth, albeit with much effort.
—From the Remake-Remodel curatorial statement by Tara Gladden
Harvey’s near-monochromatic wall installations are 90° tableaus of peculiar puddle or splatter-like forms that contain hollow stalactites and/or stalagmites. These cylinders evoke the slow-motion sculptural effects of objects entering a liquid surface as an action of gravity, a vertically-oriented, downward force. Transferred to the wall these forms suggest a slight vertigo; and, there is a tension between motion/gesture and immobile form.
—From Paul Ryan’s exhibition essay for The Old Grey Whistle Test
Humor prevails. Amanda Douglas, Heather Harvey and Faridah Al Rashaid take shots at cultural expectations by presenting witty and irreverent versions of common objects. . . Harvey modifies wall and sometimes floor construction to create the illusion that invisible forces are reshaping the environment.
—From review by Paulette Roberts-Pullen
Heather Harvey constructs terrains of a different sort: small plots of nearly transparent wax. Untitled (Blue) looks like a tiny chunk of sky cut out right above the horizon. Or is it a plot of ocean defying all known laws of physics? . . . Physically these wall-hung works inhabit a dimensional space between painting and sculpture. Metaphorically, they suggest sonnets to the natural world.
—From Joanne Mattera’s exhibition essay for Divas and Iron Chefs of Encaustic