Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard
When I imagine Relative Fields in a Garden I think about maternal power, collaboration, how things mix, how things grow together. My belief that human existence is collaboration, that community is our most important resource, grew stronger over the course of this year, as Relative Fields developed. In May 2017 the artist Ala Dehghan, invited my mother and I to do a show at her space 17ESSEX. Since we still fight as mothers and daughters do, I thought it was a terrible idea, but we kept talking. My grandmother had passed away in the summer of 2016. As a housewife the things in her house and on her person were her world. My mother and I tried to save these "things," integrating them into our lives. My mother and I discussed a painting I had made of her working in the garden (Liz Phillips, 2014) as a point of departure for our show. It could be mixed in with the self-portraits I had been making of my face interlaced with my grandmother's autumnal colored floral scarf. The paintings would function as speakers and interact with my grandmother's garden chairs (at the time a part of my mother's installation Wave Crossings on Governor's Island). When we went to our meeting with Ala, it became clear that this project was growing into a bigger space. That day I put in an application to the Queens International. In our first meeting with Sophia Marisa Lucas, Relative Fields continued to grow organically. Sophia said she had a large space, a wall that wrapped around the Panorama. I felt like a child on Christmas morning because, growing up in Queens, the Panorama was this magical fairy-lit place. The atrium's voluminous space and the wall's curved shape allow me to make many gestures that show the complexity of the passage and mixing of my mother's sound over time as well as the passage of time itself.
I paint portraits of people I love. Having my sitters present is an ideal way to have their ideas, physicality, sound, and smell in my studio. When I work on paintings that require being alone in the studio, my sitters send me audio files of books on tape, or podcasts, or music to listen to while I am painting.

I decided that I wanted to be a painter while reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. The opening lines about the heroine of the novel, "Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart" encapsulates the idea that a woman's societal purpose at the time was to be visual refreshment. At the end of the novel Lily Bart kills herself because she was seen in the wrong place at the wrong time and this scene ruins her standing in society. As a high school student trying to find her place in the world in 2004 in New York City, I related to the story and I dreamt of creating images that would inspire new stories. I encounter images daily that reinforce a view of women as decorative objects, rather than powerful, thoughtful people. I am interested in painting the qualities of a person that go beyond a conventional visual pairing of figure and ground or the depiction of light upon a figure to render them in physical space. Because my marks do not aggregate to form an illusion of light, they are exposed. The viewer can more easily see the marks that together form the final image. This evidence of the passage of time and the process of creation is an invitation to share my experience.
In the year before being able to participate in Volumes, I wrote and spoke to many friends about wanting to work on larger scale public projects that are invested in the community they inhabit. The most important museum in the place where I have spent most of my life seems like the perfect place to begin this type of work. Since my mother has worked on many public projects throughout her career it has been great to develop this installation with her. I hope that Volumes will mean more projects and collaborations of this nature.
Heidi Howard (b. 1986, Astoria, NY) studied at Yale University, Reed College, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Instituto Lorenzo de' Medici, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and BHQFU. She has exhibited her work at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY (2017, 2016, 2015); Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA and Cologne, Germany (2018, 2017); The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2017); James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY (2016); and many more. She been an artist in residence at Palazzo Monti (2018), Byrdcliffe (2014) and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). She currently lives and works between Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Sunnyside, Queens.
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