Heidi Conrod

This series explores the interplay between painting and photography, merging the tactile materiality of paint with the immediacy of the photographic image. Rooted in the tradition of still life, Bloom captures flowers and bouquets in various stages of vitality and decay. In the final printed format, painting and photography do not simply coexist; they intermingle, mimic, overlap, and disrupt each other. Photographs of flowers in still life arrangements serve as a foundation, preserving a fleeting moment in crisp detail. Combined with these images, physical layers of paint are applied - altering, highlighting or obscuring elements of the composition. This hybrid approach explores the inherent tensions and harmonies between two mediums: the mechanical precision of photography versus the material and expressive subjectivity of painting, the frozen instant versus the layered accumulation of time. The works invite viewers to contemplate the ways in which perception, memory, and materiality shape our understanding of beauty and transience.

Field notes is a body of work that explores the profound transformative experience of the natural world while contemplating the nature of existence, connections to cosmos, light, matter, forces, while connecting to history and imagining the future of our planet.

Starting with photographs taken on top of Mount Pinchincha Volcano in Ecuador, allowing the sublime mystical atmosphere, vastness of the sky, to set the “stage” for the final artworks. The rugged organic vegetation growing in severe climates reminds us of our current global climate crisis and the impact of humans on the natural world, and their (plant and animals) ability, life force to survive and adapt to all conditions.

A secondary source of hand drawn sketches of lifeforms from these locations was used to reflect a more personal “felt” experience of the landscape. The hand drawn watercolour sketches of the local flora and fauna were inspired by botanical illustrations, as well as mysterious medieval manuscripts (Voynich, RileyScrolls, Codex etc). As an artist and student of Biology, I have always been drawn to these botanical illustrations and surreal manuscripts in their attempts to illustrate, often in surreal and speculative ways, the mysteries of the world, nature of the cosmos, the wonders of the seasons, the structures, and patterns in nature.

These notebook sketches were used as reference for the abstract imagery painted directly on the photographs. The organic shapes, patterns, rhythms, cellular forms, biological patterns, plant life, animated and evolving to our imagination, and our ever-changing climate, offering beauty, hope and connectedness in our contemporary lives.

"As an homage to The Royal Hotel's rich early 20th century heritage, I have created a new series of large colourful floral abstract paintings. Inspired by the beautiful botanical textiles of the Victorian era and designs found in Japanese woodcuts, these works are a continuation of a series I called, ‘The Charged Line.’ Each painting incorporates hand-molded electric neon lights that attract the viewer’s eye, enhance, and change the compositions. " - Heidi Conrod

Exploring the relationship between light and space, Heidi Conrod’s current series of work The Charged Line sees electric neon tubes integrated with colourful abstract paintings. The stretching colourful lights, hand-moulded to fit individually across each work, disrupt and reshape both the painted compositions and the spaces surrounding the canvas. Inspired by the patterns of everyday life, such as graffiti, fabric, tiles, pavement, gardens, and pottery, the bright glass lights serve as an extension of the abstract forms painted on each canvas, which also forcefully interact with the colours of each painting. Harmony and tension play equal roles; the lights appear at once graceful, balanced additions, whilst simultaneously acting to divide the physical space and alter perceptions of colour and form. Adding an electrical element to painting introduces notions of positive/negative chemical reactions (tensions which create the electric charge itself which powers the light). With neon, positive charges source its power, which are then manipulated into different colours, like choosing a paint colour to add to a canvas. Incorporated with Conrod’s palette, the bright yet soft lights feel at once romantic and somewhat eerie, often as if reproductions of a radiant midday sun or a warm sunset glow. Used commercially since the beginning of the twentieth century, moulded neon lights have long signalled enticement and invitation to passers-by.

The subject matter of this series is Wildflowers. I used a polaroid camera to capture these resilient landscapes where the strength, beauty and naturalism of this native species are on majestic display. For me wildflowers represent nature at its most optimum. They appear faithfully year after year in the most unlikely of places, and despite the harsh surroundings they continue to show up full of grace and beauty.

I paint directly onto the polaroid film, allowing the material to interact with the surface and the pre-existing image until I reach the harmony I’m striving for. I then scan the painted polaroids so that the paint becomes 'fused' to the original photograph. To me these works explore the relationship between the expressiveness of applied paint and the singular ocular point of view of instantaneous polaroid photography and play upon the dynamic between control and chance that occurs in these two mediums.

CONSTRUCTIONS is a collaboration between photographer Genevieve Thauvette and Heidi Conrod. Thauvette’s self portraits are interpreted by Conrod through the application of hand drawn and found collaged imagery.

Heidi Conrod’s mixed media artwork draws upon an essence of liminality, a state of “in-betweenness.” Created using a combination of hand-applied paint and digitally-manipulated imagery, Conrod’s fantastical artworks extend an invitation to the viewer to a space betwixt eras, media, and style. Much like the sense of nostalgia and the interactive sensorial stimulation of a carnival or fair, Conrod’s “magic mirrors” mix vintage found imagery and paint within a digital process to engage the viewer. Playful figurative images pull the observer into an imagined time within the mid-twentieth century, while the minimal and colourful painted strokes maintain a sense of the present.

-Rose Ekins