Heather Leier: Hiraeth

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Heather Leier, "Secret Place, from Fort Series," nd

photo-intaglio and chine-collé, 48" x 72"

Opening Reception: Friday, January 20^th, 5-8pm

*artist will be in attendance

Artist Talk: Saturday, January 21^st, 3pm

Hiraeth is said to be homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places of your past.

Hiraeth consists of two bodies of print based work that explore the nostalgia, vulnerability, and wonder associated with childhood.

Bio

Heather Leier is an artist and Assistant Professor based in Corner Brook Newfoundland. She completed her BFA in 2012 from the University of British Columbia and received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2016. Her work has been exhibited in widely in BC, Alberta, and internationally. 

Artist Statement

Informed by my anxious perception of my past as well as twenty-first century life, I create spaces that viewers can physically and emotionally enter, inducing feelings of uncertainty, nostalgia, vulnerability, and wonder whilst providing pause and contemplation.

I have most recently been doing this through my use of print as installation. The spaces that I construct exist somewhere between illusion and reality. They are images yet they feel as though they can be entered. They are warm and bright but are also dark and suspicious. It is in these liminal spaces, these grey areas, that I find the most complex and dynamic feelings.

My work aims to evoke consideration of our individual anxieties, the things from our past that we consciously and subconsciously hide as well as the objects and spaces in which we seek comfort and refuge. Influenced by collections, ephemera, monsters, and memory, I seek to recall the past through constructions in the present in order to understand the experience of growing up and more broadly living with anxiety in the world today.