PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present still—moving, an exhibition of new work by Heather Watkins which brings together a series of intricately stitched textiles and a text-based video projection.
The exhibition features twenty embroidered orbs that encompass the room, echoing the movement of planetary orbits. Viewed up close, variations between stitches become visible, tender, imperfect. Halos encircle their stilled and spinning forms, their scale slips and shifts from near and far, macro to micro.
The root of Heather Watkins work processes. As she turns her embroidery hoop over weeks and months, the accumulation of stitches begins to emerge into restless and evolving forms. The works continue this shifting and transforming even after their completion—their titles reflecting their ever-evolving status.
In Oracle, a text-based video installation, viewers are invited into a darkened space, where words and phrases appear and dissolve in a hypnotic rhythm, summoning processes of creation, evolution, dissolution, and renewal.
Together, the works chart a period of suspended time and stalled movement, shaped by a changing relationship to distance and to spaciousness and to living with the unknown.
Heather Watkins is a visual artist whose studio practice includes experimental forms of drawing and printmaking, book arts, installation, and sculpture. “My work is process-oriented, rooted in materials-based working methods that allow me to explore physical and psychic phenomena such as flow, stasis, circulation, time, and the limits of sensory perception,” she notes, “The incremental, serial nature of the objects I make is driven by the desire to understand how line evokes form and creates meaning while remaining resolutely abstract.”
Watkins holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a dual Bachelor’s from Pitzer College in English and Classical Studies. She has been the recipient of grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council and has been awarded residencies at Caldera (Sisters, OR), the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (Otis, OR) and Em Space Book Arts Center (Portland, OR). Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions regionally and nationally including at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), The Lumber Room (Portland, OR), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), Planthouse (New York, NY), and CANADA (New York, NY). Her work is included in the collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), the Miller Meigs Collection (Portland, OR), the Portland Art Museum, Portland State University and the Artist’s Book Collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) as well as numerous library collections.
Visitor information: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Tuesday – Saturday or by appointment
Heather Watkins, still—opening, linen and silk thread, 15 3⁄4" x 15 3⁄4"