Might and Mane, Heidi Schaefer
6 - 21 May 2006
For her exhibition at Bloc Heidi Schaefer will be presenting a number of new works including a series of line drawings entitled Sticks and Stones. Using militaristic imagery as her subject matter, Schaefer has rendered cannons, missiles and other instruments of war in such a way that they appear to have grown a fine layer of hair.
Also featured within the exhibition is an installation entitled Wars We Have Seen, comprising a number of upright pipes supporting organically-shaped pieces of foam. Functioning as self-contained islands or planets, these brightly coloured sculptures are home to miniature objects such as toy soldiers, planes and electrical components.
The experience of Diaspora (displacement, dislocation and its causes) is integral to Schaefer’s artistic practice. Having spent majority of her life ‘in between cultures’ due to family and personal migration, her work examines what takes place in the in-between spaces generated from being displaced or dislocated, and how extremes of movement and stasis, of humour and tragedy can inform this.
Through recent works Schaefer has begun to consider how war and peace shapes this experience. In a recent collaboration she entered into a visual dialogue with Canadian artist Cheryl Sourkes about war and peace. She has also worked with the Territorial Army to make a body of work from their military arsenal.
In her work Schaefer offers us carnivalesque humour and playfulness amidst suggestions of violence and disruption; a sense of familiar unfamiliarity, of comic tragedy, of the world being turned upside down.
Click here for Waging War Playing Games, written by Jessica Wyman for Heidi Schaefer’s exibition and publication in May 2006.
