Pronouncements
Heather Tolleson is a painter, sculptor, and mixed-media installation artist living and working in Austin, Texas. She has been creating and showing works for the past ten years. Now a partner in Atelier 3-D, LLC and Art On The Way, she continues to create work that explores materiality, scale, formal objectivity and personal revelation. Heather was recently awarded the AVAA Artist of the Year: Early Career Award for 2009.
Group Exhibitions:
Curious Room Summer Show, Flatbed Press, Austin, TX 2010
A Touch of Class, E4 Gallery, Austin, TX 2010
The Crossings, Texas Society of Sculptors, Austin, TX 2010
Stations, Pump Project Art Complex, Austin, TX 2010
McCord Community Center, Austin, TX 2010
Austin City Hall, The People’s Gallery, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2010
Austin Galleries, Texas Society of Sculptors, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2009
The Crossings, Texas Society of Sculptors, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2009
Atelier 3-D, East Austin Studio Tour, Austin, TX 2009
Texas Society of Sculptors, Sculptfest, Umlauf Sculpture Center, Austin, TX 2009
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2009
5×7 Show, Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX 2009
BASH Benefit for Austin State Hospital, Austin, TX 2009
Austin City Hall, The People’s Gallery, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2009
Atelier 3-D, East Austin Studio Tour, Austin, TX 2008
Telos, Christophers Gallery, Marfa, TX 2008
The Crossings, Texas Society of Sculptors, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2008
5×7, Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas, TX 2008
5×7, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX 2008
Identity Complex, Austin Art Start, Metrohouse, Austin, TX 2008
5×7 Show, Arthouse Jones Center, Austin, TX 2008
Museum of Fine Arts, Austin, TX 2008
Brocca Gallery, TSOS Abstract Show, juried exhibition, Austin, TX 2008
Austin Figurative Gallery, Self-Portrait Show, Austin, TX 2008
Austin Art Start Tour, Austin, TX 2007
Atelier 3-D, East Austin Studio Tour, Austin, TX 2007
Schoen Studios, East Austin Studio Tour, Austin, TX 2007
Texas State Gallery, Sculpture Network of Texas, juried exhibition, San Marcos 2007
Prime, Chinati Weekend, Marfa, TX 2007
Texas Clay Artists Association, Six Pack Show, Austin, TX 2007
Solo Exhibitions:
Imperative, Co-Lab, Austin, TX 2009
Infer Genius: Sightless Italians, Big Medium Bay 10, Austin, TX 2008
Awards, Grants, and Collaborations:
Austin Art League Scholarship Recipient 2010
City of Austin Cultural Arts Program Grant, Austin,TX 2010
Installation Director on Art On The Way: Barton Barriers, Austin, TX 2010
Holman Commission with sculptor Steve Dubov, Austin, TX 2010
AVAA Artist of the Year: Early Career 2009
Arts Administration:
Atelier 3-D Sculpture Studio
Principal: 2008-present
Instructor: Mold-Making and Reproductions 2008-2009
Art On The Way
Vice President: 2009-present
Art On The Way is a non-profit organization dedicated to transforming Austin’s unusable portions of land into sites for contemporary visual art.
Statement:
I seek to center the viewer in a stunning illogical world of form and strictly ordered chaos. The intention is to generate a strong formal focus, creating works that challenge monumental scale, often through multiple pieces joined into an impressive sum. But the work is strangely solemn and intimate despite its magnitude; drawing the viewer in and asking her to assign meaning and reason to an artificial landscape of carefully articulated form.
I imbue the static nature of three-dimensional sculpture with radical spontaneity, drawing inspiration from the fluidity of line in two-dimensional gesture studies, organic forms in nature, and the precariousness of materials stretched beyond their inherent limitations—used and misused—challenging boundaries in an awkward dance against gravity. My work is a reflection of flux, the state of becoming, things in progress or regress, and the loneliness of this isolated state.
For me it is impossible to separate life and art. I was bedridden for much of my youth, creating a world in absence of external stimuli, growing with nature, unnaturally, warped by artificial light and confined space. My work is stripped of color, simplified and abstracted as a reflection of that missing stimuli. These works are spontaneous outgrowths, self-willed forms distorted in their isolation without nourishment or teleological aim, caught still in an eternal moment of becoming, an objective study of inner life without motive force, frozen, timeless, and exquisite.
My next work is a continuation of that study, a personal expression superficially stripped of indexical fingerprint. The distilled silence and static solemnity remain, but now the pieces take on an absurd whimsy, a half-hearted child-like expression within an elegant framework of sophisticated aesthetic masking. The pieces reveal their truth at the same time they deny it, obscuring the revelation and prolonging the search for absolution.
funny how…
… inane I feel in putting misplaced words to a misplaced life. I hear echoes of past pen-crimes: I am neither kind nor timid and I am cut free; No bit destruction is enough; For a short time a small god; No sanctity and no meaning– though these themselves are just an assembly of letters. I cannot piece it, nor am I willing to finger the wreckage and ruin, pick a piece and hold it to the light. I am, I am, and know little else. I do and sin in doing. Somewhere in the time that slides between I sleep a little and tell myself, mild-smiling, I have won.