Heidi Norton

Heidi Norton is a New York-based artist whose 1970s upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life and nature. She works regularly with materials of varying transparency such as resin, glass, and wax in a way that preserves, encases, and displays embedded plant life and organic forms. There is a thoughtfulness in how they are presented as the viewer is pulled between scientist and hobbyist, dissectionist and admirer. The pieces can be cool and detached until they are not—flipping between objective and subjective viewing. The viewer must zoom in, zoom out, and move around, and in doing so, we are constantly pulling the pieces apart and putting them back together again. The works are playful, but not without a sense of danger. 

Interview with Heidi Norton
Questions by Nancy Kim

When looking at both your photography and sculpture together, the connection between photography and sculpture is so strongly felt. It is almost as if the sculptures are the visual/physical manifestation of a photographic process unpacked and revealed. The final product of a printed image can seem so clean and perfect while the way you handle material seems more and more tactile, loose, and gritty. 
The relationship between image and object in my practice is reflexive and fluid. This is exhibited in a number of ways ranging from building objects to be photographed (New Age Still Life); to making sculptures that resemble photographs, or as you mention, illustrate the making or properties of a photograph (The Museum Archive Dedicated to Steichen, which resembles photographic wet plates); to sculptures that are made, exhibited, and then brought back into the studio to be deconstructed and re-photographed. 

Often these varying transparent sculptures will be layered on top of other ones in the studio; and through the apparatus of the camera, light, perspective, and the compression of space, objects are transformed into flat, two-dimensional representations of something totally different. They become literal “mergers,” forming something completely new, previously invisible to the eye. The idea that a machine/apparatus allows us to see things invisible is fascinating to me, and it’s something that I think about when making the large glass works. How do I visually represent through non-scientific materials something that is only visible through a lens? The glass sculptures, also resembling scientific slides, pull you closer to examine the micro elements, but then push you back to reveal a greater composition and a bigger idea of something existential. I like to think of my practice as cyclical and sustainable. 

While elements of the work such as plants, mushrooms, etc. are alive and in flux, regenerating and decaying, the photographs represent something fixed in time and space—markers of sorts. They also co-opt a language from one another. Because of this flux and evolution, only evident through a revisiting to the physical piece (or through documentation of the work), there is a latency in the works that’s similar to what happens in photography after the image is exposed before it is visible through the chemical process. The silver halide crystals of a photograph can trap light, just as photoreceptors of a plant absorb light during photosynthesis. As the plants move through ecological spans of time, the works’ physical forms expand and compress. 

And lastly, and probably the most significant, the presentation and visual balance is important. You see the glass frame and the 4:3 aspect ratio (the viewfinder) reused through all works, however, with the glass sculpture and wax works, there is a level of skrunky-ness, a wet, drippy, oozy mess, sometimes with detritus layered in. Their tactility is on display. This is balanced with the sterility of the framed and formally presented photographs. 

Did you find the addition of a sculptural component to your practice to be a natural move? Was it a leap or a slow progression? A moment of revelation or slow transition?
It was a slow move, and then a leap, and then lots of slower cycling realized through the practice of working. This includes lots of mishaps, unplanned breaks (of the glass), and deaths of plants which all later became integral to the work. Back in the early years, I was building sets and displays to photograph objects such as plants and other new age objects from my parents’ attic. I was desperate to figure out how to take what I was seeing through the bellows and ground glass, both a three-dimensional presentation and a flat representation (formed on the ground glass), in real life. When photographing with a view camera it does two things simultaneously, it allows you to see a live projected version, but if you stand back and look at the surface of the glass, you see a flat image, the two dimensional version. At the same time I became very interested in the materiality of the plants layered with materials that killed, but also “preserved” them, especially latex paint. I had a plant that was painted completely white and left for months, only for me to come back and find it had sprouted a new life. I also was thinking about as a child how I would press plants in a book to preserve them.

So one day it just dawned on me: What if I pressed a plant against the frame? Not the frame of the camera, but a larger frame of glass. Using resin and paint, I pressed a plant so on one side it was super flat and suffocating, but on the other side it was 3d and super explosive. It forced the viewer to work back and forth, move in and out. After that, the moves were slower and involved making, then showing, and then cycling, and breaking down, and then recreating. Often images get made later, after a sculpture is shown, and then exhibited with a new object.

Your work brings to mind how historically in art, nature was often presented as female and the way concepts and ideas were projected on the female form: depictions of women serving as objects of contemplation to talk about life cycles, art and beauty, etc. Do you see plant life and nature as a way to talk about women? 
I like this question. I never located female or male in any of these works until I started thinking about creating a child. I made a piece in 2015 after a male family member offered me a $1000 to conceive a child one night. I was mad and felt so violated. I was nearing the end of my 30s and coming to a new relationship with my body. Cryogenics and the Lucky Bamboo is reflective of my role as a woman producer and the expectations that come along with that. It was made after looking at several virtual images of fertility shrines and studying cryogenics. 

This marks a big shift in my work, as the works since are much more related to the body. This is especially evident in the things I make to go on the pieces—tongues, bodily fluids, medical and scientific materials, drips and smears, etc. Also, plant reproductive organs represented though images or the actual plant organs are used in the works. While the works become more bodily and fluid, they also become more synthetic with the addition of plastics and putrid, acidic, artificial color. With this layering of organics and non perishables, the juxtaposition of natural and artificial becomes more apparent, forcing the work to shift into a narrative more focused on the environment and the devastations we all face.

Shortly after I had my child, I did an interview with Faith Wilding for Bomb Magazine. We spoke about her upbringing in a religious commune and how that affected her, and later related to her founding of WomanHouse—the birth of the feminist art movement. We discussed the influence of Susan Griffin’s writings on Ecofeminism. Essentially, Ecofeminism draws parallels and points to distinct relations between the devastation of the natural world and environment, and the oppression of women through a patriarchal society. So the gendering of nature as a woman is not necessarily because women are thought of as nurturers or the feminine, but instead, are in similar states of oppression by the same male-dominant forces. Right now we live in a time where environmental awareness and climate activism has become feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.” White patriarchal norms and histories that have assumed the position that economic growth is more important; a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable. There is a recent study that came out of a University in Sweden that links a direct relationship between climate deniers and the far right anti-feminist. It’s not a coincidence that teen activist Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (founder of the Green New Deal) are getting constantly berated and threatened by conservative white men.

I’m so sorry that happened to you. That’s really awful. The approach to women, as simply bodies, as resources to be exploited and “put to use”...it’s maddening and far too common. The way we talk about bodies reveals the insidiousness of that thinking. In your work, I see that parallel between the way we approach women’s bodies and our approach to nature most in pieces where the “science” becomes more intrusive like in Cryogenics and the Lucky Bamboo. I think about your latest work almost as an examination of that kind of scrutiny and projection on the bodies of women. It feels as if those signs of “science” are more intrusive on the “natural” elements. They now seem to go beyond display; they are more activated, more pernicious. The “scientific” tubing within the newer pieces seems to intrude on the “organic” elements and act upon them. The glass and resin seem to not only press and display, but suffocate, and at times feel more like commercial packaging. For example, in The Museum Archive, the different frames are like slides, but done in a way that by viewing, we are dissecting. It seems also like the glass is the main vehicle of display, but it is often kept sharp or dangerous in some way. Even when round with softened edges like in Ellipse with Nitrogen Fixers and Snake Plant Buds, the glass is slicing into wax…It is almost as if the scientific nature of the presentation puts me the viewer in the uncomfortable and yet powerful position as oppressor. I feel myself examining... How has your thinking/making changed or evolved in regards to the viewer and his or her interactions with your pieces? Are you thinking more about ways to discuss the systemic nature of these issues within your work? How do you think the discussion surrounding patriarchy and environment has shifted since Faith Wilding and Susan Griffin? How has the context changed? Or have they?
I appreciate your acute awareness to this ambivalence. We live in such non-nuanced times that it’s sometimes hard to locate the details. It’s not always about extremes, but more about all the tiny feels in between. I am always trying to push on this—from the making of the work, the work itself, to the viewer’s experience. I am interested in mimicking the feeling of being the oppressor of nature while all the while feeling vulnerable and anxious. We did this to ourselves. We did this to the natural world. It’s our job to clean it up. This is how we feel every day about the climate crisis, right? We ask ourselves, “Am I doing enough? How can my small contributions matter? Do they make a difference?” And then you end up not doing anything, but hoping it gets better. Relying solely on hope, leads to inactivism. 

I often feel guilt about killing plants or producing more waste for the sake of art. But I see these works as totems to heighten people’s awareness. I want them to go through a myriad of mixed feelings and feel all the tiny feels. That dance—mentally and physically—is important to me. When making the works, I often think about how the viewer will interact with the materials—sensorially and as signifiers. I think of the Forest Magician as an otherworldly creature; surrounded by optical devices (photo gels, prisms, lenses), there is a cluster of oyster mushrooms that swell and ooze from the pregnated abdomen of the glass. It’s wrapped and “protected” with vinyl, while being suffocated simultaneously. The layering of plastics, the tubes, the lcd screens, the slides, and the wrapping fight the natural elements, but they also point more directly to the death of the organic materials, either through suffocating them or by proximity. 

If we think of these as gendered, we can draw analogies between the ways women’s bodies are examined, gazed upon, and scrutinized. The tactility, the visceral lure of the work brings the viewer close, examining in a micro way, but then they are pushed back to see/understand the aesthetic relations, but also face the burden of visually dissecting and reorganizing through vision (and the contexts they bring to the work). The works entice in a way the viewer wants to touch, poke, and squish. The plants and organic material offer a friendly, familiarity that invite the viewer, but as they decay and evolve, the viewer’s emotions shift, and with the addition of the reflective surface that sometimes mirrors, the viewer (especially the male) is confronted with their own moral dilemmas in relation to “mother nature,” the climate crisis, and their role within it.

I love how much you think about the different ways your pieces can exist and how these varied approaches can affect the read. We as artists sometimes find ourselves hesitating just before starting something new. When do you think about introducing a new material, a new presentation, or new installation?
There are a variety of different ways I work. I don’t necessarily think of them as prescriptive, but they balance one another and are significant to the outcome and my own well being as a maker. My education came during the transition between analogue and digital photography, and as a result, photography and the properties (optical, chemical, physical) became very inherent in all of my work. The photographs are shot with a 4x5 view camera—a slow methodical, performative way of working. Each image is constructed through the moving and arranging of the objects as well as the viewing process. By this I mean, there is a lot of moving in and out of a dark curtain, going back and forth from “set” to “device”—light to dark, actual vs represented, real vs projection. The camera lens and viewing plane are independent allowing the maker to shift perspective and manipulate/disrupt the eventual viewing and understanding of the presented photo. This “disruption” is simulated in the glass sculptures where I create a space that offers both objective and subjective viewing—a perspective “set” of sorts where you can sit and view from one point or you can walk through the work. This is especially evident in To Be Looked at (from One Side of the Glass) with Two Eyes, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 2019 (a nod to Duchamp). In this work you can see my process (how the photo is created) and also the two dimensional “end result” simultaneously in the object. 

This clinical way of photographing is nicely cushioned against the messy chaotic process of sculpting where I feel free to take many risks. Not only is it toxic, sticky, and dirty (due to the resin and plant materials), but it’s also dangerous. I most often end up breaking and deconstructing large glass sculptures to cycle back into new works—both sculptures and photographs. This is intentional in that I believe in a sustainable practice, especially since I am making new materials out of plastics (as a direct signifier) to layer against organic materials. Additionally using resin to encase and “preserve” nature is similar to how resin and sap of the natural world preserve and embalm beetles and insects. The other thing recycling materials does is it pushes against this idea of the “original” and the collectible “unique” work. Some of these sculptures only exist through the photograph (either the installation shot or in a new arrangement within in a photo). This in a way restricts it to a very specific vantage point and the sculpture becomes defined through the photo in a Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture sense. Also, what does this mean to the original? Does it take it out of the art market? I like that it pushes against all these traditions. 

When you are constantly recycling your own works­—literally deconstructing—they become new materials, authentic assemblage chunks, making it easy to not “hesitate”, as they are the only materials that I have allowed myself access to. In the past, the process and the works often pointed back to the personal. They loosely referenced a personal narrative tracing my parents back to land movers of the 70s. But more recently, my work has become more political and environmentally focused, and with this shift I have thought of the materials and their permanence/impermanence. With the last two works, The Candle that Burns and Iridescent Wet Plate, the materials either “protect” the works and plants with bubble wrap castings or the wicks in The Candle that Burns destroy the piece, burning the biodegradable parts and leaving the plastics.

You have been living in New York City for almost five years now. What are the ways you see the New York influencing your work? The idea of a big city can be daunting for a lot of people, was it challenging finding your footing there?
New York is an incredible city to live in—it’s so alive and even more so when you live in it (people that have lived here their whole lives will probably agree they still feel this feeling). It’s much more than I ever thought. I think a lot of people (including myself) have certain preconceived notions of what the New York City art scene is like. Coming from Chicago, a manageable city, it’s super challenging. And this is exactly what I asked for. I had lived in and worked in Chicago for almost all of my 20s and 30s, I taught at the same school where I received my MFA. I felt like I had achieved a lot of successes, but was ready for something more. I soon found out that art is much more regional than you think. 

Moving here permitted me a sense of anonymity, allowing me to take on more risks. I landed this incredible residency at the Unilever corporation with a penthouse studio in Tribeca. It was tiring and filled with a lot of hustle, but an exciting first year. In 2016, a year to the day we moved to New York, I took a pregnancy test, and we welcomed the exciting news of having a child. Having a child here has opened many new doors, as well as pushed me in directions I never saw possible. I have far less time to waste and need to be more resourceful and resilient. Time becomes crucial in a way I never experienced before, and this is great in many ways. I get off on efficiency and always have, but it also adds pressure to maintain a hyper focused outlook, and when you have an off-day, it can be frustrating.

With more time limitations, does each studio session feel more high stakes? 
Studio sessions can feel like there is more at stake. There are times where I think working under pressure is productive, but there are also times where it’s not. For example, when researching and ideating, pressure can be anxiety and guilt producing, so I have to constantly remind myself that this is all part of the process, and it’s ok that I am not physically making something at the time. 

Plants are important in your work, for sure, what about your home and day-to-day? Do you have a green thumb? Living in a metropolis, do you feel you get enough nature? 
Since 2010 I’ve been living by parks that were designed under the City Beautiful movement. In Chicago we lived in Humboldt Park while I worked by Garfield Park. Here in New York, we live by Olmsted’s Prospect Park. So constructed urban landscapes/natural spaces have long been of interest to me.

My studio and home are located a few blocks from Prospect Park in Brooklyn. This was an intentional decision on behalf of our family. I have always wanted to live both in the city and the woods at the same time. I really need both worlds as they offer different, but significant things. In 2014 I mounted a large exhibition at Elmhurst Art Museum that researched and focused on architectural and urban spaces that are institutional in Chicago: Mies Van Der Rohe, Jens Jenson, William Le Baron Jenney, Daniel Burnham. I was inspired by living and working in the Emerald Necklace—Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, and the boulevard that connects them. Burnham worked closely with Olmsted to transform these cities into spaces that offer retreat and refuge for the people that live in them. And believe me, they are very important to me and my family, life and practices. But parks, in their fabrication and avenue of escape prevent people from seeing how nature and the natural world are integrated into every aspect and moment of their day to day lives. Right? By creating binaries—that park over there, that is my natural space, and this street/sidewalk etc is my non-natural space—we begin to exclude all living things and even non-living things by not treating them as precious. We need to think of all of these things as interconnected—a mesh, a web—and this will lead to ecological thought and thinking. And yes, I have a green thumb, naturally (wink), that I acquired from my parents. In both recent residencies—Chicago and here—we have had rooms and space solely dedicated to plants. It really helps with our need for soft fascination. Ha! 

You created a response piece, The Faceless Plant, to ecological theorist Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought in Bomb Magazine. Who else inspires you? What’s on your reading list?
An Introduction to Umwelt by Jakob Von Uexküll is something special. Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects is an important text, and in fact, he curated a profound art exhibition at Ballroom Marfa in 2018. Homeostasis is Not Enough: Order and Survival in Early Ecological Art by Melissa Sue Ragain published in Art Journal in 2014 is something I have read at least a dozen times or more. Anything by Michael Marder, Jane Bennett, and Michael Pollan (especially his new book on psychedelics). In Why Look at Plants?: The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art, I have an essay, The Glass Shields the Eyes of the Plant, but there are many amazing contributors. Ghost Nature published by Caroline Picard and Green Lantern Press 2014. Also, on a different note, the essay by Slutsky and Rowe, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. For subway reads, presently I am reading, How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell. And I am about to pick up: We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

You also recently curated the exhibition By Our Own Hands at Camayuhs gallery in Atlanta. Will you talk about the difference in organizing and preparing your own show vs curating the works of other artists? How does being an artist contribute to the curatorial process?
When you have limited time, you also learn that there are more efficient ways of building community and networking outside of openings. Curating happens to be one of them! What’s lovely is that you can really use critical discovery, thinking and researching like an artist, but instead of doing it for yourself, you are doing it in service of another practice and person. There is a displacement of the ego. This feels good. I think artists that curate and organize are particularly aware of how the work is treated and handled, but also appreciate the new family of artists that are coming together. 

I have met some of my most inspirational artists through group shows. These new collectives and communities form new ways of thinking or at the very least, recontextualize work, adding a new perspective to the curator, artist, and viewer. Plus I really enjoy thinking about historical canonical artists like Faith Wilding and Rosemary Mayer and trying to find the abstract threads of thought in generations that follow. 

It seems like curating gives space to support artists and their completed works. But what about in the making process? How did you personally find community to support and develop your on-going art-making practice?
When you develop and nurture new ways of contextualizing works through community/groups of artists as mentioned above, it allows you space and frees up ways of thinking about your own work, right? I think with the Candle that Burns, I made this work to “fit” into By Our Own Hands’ themes on “craft”. I have been making wax works for a while, but never referenced the candle directly; and I like this in thinking about a revitalization/renaissance of New Age trends, in culture in general, but especially in materials in art making. This show, a group of artists, gave me permission to do this.

Aside from curating, I have found other ways of grouping artists and fostering community through artists groups. After having my child, I started an artist mom group, and I am also a part of a women sculptor group and an all-women group for makers and thinkers called Seventy-One. These are intimate meetups where we meet at a home or studio (with the mom group, sometimes with kids and sometimes not), look at work either in a critique situation or on a projector, and discuss topics that are affecting us as women in the art world. It’s a great way to offer support and to network. Some of my most recent major life choices were a result of advice given to me at a meetup. Anyone can start these and they grow quickly. People in New York are constantly seeking ways to get closer to people in an efficient way and this is a great way to do it. 

What have you been exploring in your work lately? 
I have a site-specific installation up at the Ace hotel right now that marks a new direction in my practice. It explores plants and the natural world’s relationships to interior design and transient hospitality, particularly this new trend in “hip” hotel design that extends into new age mainstream lifestyles/wellness industry. Using tropes borrowed from surrealism, trompe l’oeil, and photographic strategies, I use magnification and distance to destabilize place and perspective, raising questions about what is “real” or “fake.” I want people to think about what they consider real nature, and constructed nature—images, parks, etc—and if such categories affects the way we think about the natural world. 

As a meditation on the vantage of a stranger in transit, Prisms “exposes the comfort of pastoral tropes” in a designed, public space. The gallery acts as an intersection point for the viewer, the traveler. Seeing through their prism, they are confronted with the decision to exit the double archways to the communal glowing tech space of the lobby or they can choose the option to exit by passing through a replicated set of classical archways that lead to a utopic green wooded landscape by a creek where sits the glass sculpture, Forest Magician. The surface of the wallpaper consists of scans of the globular bubbles and plant parts of my sculpture surfaces. They are magnified and intended to act as a mesh substrate that merges the glass shelved sculptures with the inside vs outside effect. This dichotomy—inside vs outside, surface vs subsurface, micro vs macro, abstraction vs representational, here vs there—this dissension, pushes the viewer into various mental and emotional states.

What are your upcoming projects?
I’m about to open a three person show at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Soft Fascination. The title of the show is built on the idea that nature has a unique restorative ability. Environmental Psychologist Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have proven that natural spaces and vistas create “soft fascinating stimuli” that effortlessly capture our attention and lull us into a sort of hypnotic state where negative thoughts and emotions are overtaken by a positive sense of well being. 

Being that I am interested in the captivity of the viewer, their gaze and interplay with the work. I find this topic to be very inspiring in that I always hope that the viewer goes through some form of transcendence.  

To find out more about Heidi and her work, check out her website.