Sometimes But Not Always #2 original artwork by Heather Day USA 2017
48" × 60", MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS, 2017
Heather Day’s (b. 1989, Honolulu, HI) abstract paintings draw the viewer through atmospheric shifts of color and map-like etchings. Pools of pigment flood across canvases forming layers of stitched contours beneath a lexicon of gestural mark making. Day’s painted canvases are dissected and fastened together, propagated and regrown, uncovering forms that echo between paintings.
Within the rhythm of repetition, and the body’s own limitations, this method of painting embraces chance interactions and the way a mark evolves as the artist attempts to replicate it. By reproducing a marking, or cutting up and binding nebulous forms into slotted bays, Day mines human error and the opposing forces of control and chaos. Those ideas of challenging perception and sorting through memories are a constant source in Day’s conceptual well, rooted in myriad cultural shifts, languages and international migrations she experienced growing up. Living first in Hawaii, then Japan, back to Washington D.C., and finally Chicago, where she discovered her love of painting before attending Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Rooted in the traditions of abstract expressionism, Day’s paintings reflect a growing universe where language and communication are less concrete. Personal symbols, jotted down like errant notes, or emotive slurries of color synthesized from the natural world around the artist, create a visual language for the viewer to decipher.
