“Being a photographer and being an artist working with materials like resin, plants, and glass — those two worlds should not really mix,” says Heidi Norton. “You have the camera and you have film and you’re trying to keep things clean and archival, and then you have dirt and glass shards everywhere.” Such contradictions are at the core of Norton’s work, from the immaculate glow of her photography to the dirt-under-your-fingernails feel of her sculptural pieces, which typically feature houseplants in some form or another. Norton started incorporating plants into her photographic practice several years ago in a series of still lifes. It was partly a way to bring the natural world she grew up with, in rural West Virginia, into the urban setting of Chicago, where she’s lived since getting her MFA at the School of the Art Institute in 2002. Those photos eventually inspired her to make plant-based sculptures that explore how we create, cultivate, and change ourselves. Therein lies the central paradox: “The idea of preservation, and trying to save the plant while at the same time killing it through that preservation, became really interesting to me,” she says. “All of the mediums I use deal with that idea in different ways.”
Even her studio itself, shot by Debbie Carlos for part two of Sight Unseen’s series on Chicago artists, is part of the process. A bright space in an industrial building in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood, it’s a controlled, but continually changing, environment. “It’s always a surprise when I come into the studio. Like, what the hell has happened in here? Oh, that’s dead. That’s alive. That’s melted.” Initially, “it was a source of a lot of anxiety because I didn’t understand what was going to happen. I would come check on the plants, make sure they were still alive, that kind of thing. But as I grew into the work and the work developed, it came to be that the death of the plants was just as significant as the life of the plant, or the regeneration and re-growth of something out of the piece.” Norton’s creations, which often recycle elements from past works, are “in a constant state of flux” but undergo the kind of slow metamorphosis you don’t really see taking place. Nevertheless, when I visited her studio earlier this year, Norton did her best to help me envision it.
Whitescape, upper left, is a still life photograph that, amazingly, doesn’t seem all that still. As Norton says, it’s “hard to decipher where things start and end.” That kind of play on spatial relations is what originally inspired her to make sculptural pieces, some of which end up deconstructed, like the ones pictured here, in order to be reborn into other works. The Plexiglas column is a mold for wax. Copper urns like the one on the floor, which Norton sometimes uses in installations, “show up a lot in classic Dutch still lifes,” she notes, and have been used as repositories for ashes, evoking cycles of life and death.
A detail from Michael (yes, Jackson), Norton’s first sculptural piece containing plants, from 2011 — made in response to her Whitescape still life. The goal was to achieve something similar in three dimesnions while also getting into ideas of preservation and life cycles. The title is a nod to the tabloid rumors, before and after Jackson’s death, that his body would be “plastinated” or cryogenically frozen.
The flip side of Michael. The stark-white, three-dimensional front — or back, depending on where you’re standing — is “very full and has a form to it,” says Norton, while here “it becomes this weird flattening of space,” almost like a plant pressing or microscope slide but on a much larger scale.
The table where Norton keeps an evolving collection of materials — a piece of coral, a rock found at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, wax hexagons from a previous installation — that serve as “inspiration or visual references” or might get used in future projects.
A close-up of some of the objects Norton keeps for their formal qualities or their personal significance. At the far right is the cage a queen bee inhabits before being introduced to the hive. Norton’s parents were, at one time, beekeepers. She had a pretty unconventional childhood, growing up in a valley of the Blue Ridge mountains between West Virginia and Maryland, the daughter of hippie homesteaders. Norton says her parents now find it hard to identify with their back-to-the-land past — exactly the sort of existential shift that ties into her work.
First published in the 1970s, the Foxfire series was an oral history of Appalachian traditions that could also be used as a practical guide to living off the land. This copy belonged to Norton’s parents. Stuffed inside was an old note, in her father’s handwriting, with home remedies, including what to do if you step on a rusty nail. “It was like, take a cobweb and bacon and an orange peel and wrap it in muslin and apply that to the entry point. I pulled this prank on my dad where I called him and told him I’d stepped on a nail, and he was like ‘Go to the emergency room right now!’ Then I told him I found his home remedy and he was like, ‘That sounds insane and really not safe.’ And I said, ‘But it’s written in your handwriting.’ And he said, ‘I would never write anything like that.’ There was this big pushback and resistance, like, that’s not me. Some of it’s because of time and memory, but I think a lot of it is what you choose to remember and what you choose to forget.”
A collaboration with writer and curator Karsten Lund, this book was part of an installation piece called “After the Fires of a Little Sun,” from Norton’s first solo gallery show at Chicago’s Ebersmoore in 2011 (since closed). Lund and Norton grafted his text and her images into volumes that read as if they were compiled by someone she has described as “a mad botanist with a flair for detours into the histories of art and counter-culture.”
A selection of elements from the same 2011 Ebersmoore show.
Wax “rejects” that may get reused into future projects. The wax is a blended paraffin that can be a bit brittle but holds color really well. To get the eye-catching shades she wants, Norton sometimes uses wax dyes, but mostly, she uses Crayola crayons.
Norton holding up the remains of a piece from her solo show last year at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The glass was repurposed from a previous MCA installation by Liam Gillick. Norton made these pieces “with the understanding that their lifespan only existed within the duration of the show,” she says. “I was interested in museological display and preservation. At the end of the show, it really hurt for me to leave them and break them, but it’s this conflict that drives me to want to make the work even more. It’s been very helpful in understanding what the art means to you, and how it’s still an object but it’s also an extension of yourself.”
A leftover from another one of her MCA pieces, which will get reused in a future work. To the left is one of her large-scale photographs, which often feature repurposed materials from her sculptures. In this case, Norton pulled a whole sheet of resin off the glass of an old piece, coated it with wax to create a “dripping, ice-like” effect, and then photographed it.
The multicolored chunk of wax (top right) belonged to Norton’s piece Wax Corner, a reference to Joseph Beuys’s Fat Corners. Norton poured the wax in her studio and then photographed it, resulting in an arresting image that evokes her recurrent themes as well as landscape features. “It kind of looks like a volcano, kind of like a waterfall.” Also here, left to right: a small wax hexagon with ceramics and cactus, a hexagonal mold with various ephemera inside, dried leaves from a croton plant, a wax form in a bottle neck, a medium hexagon with white reindeer moss, and a bottle of resin dye.
Norton’s Wax Corner photograph.
An untitled photograph from Norton’s 2010 series “New Age Still Life.”
Given to her by a good friend, this book, says Norton, “is a resource in regards to the use and exploration of color in my work.” Norton draws inspiration from all sorts of places, including teaching. She’s an instructor at the School of the Art Institute and Northwestern University. “There’s a great deal of sharing of ideas that happens in academia. There’s a way the students keep me refreshed in terms of what’s relevant.”
Norton frequently contrasts the density and opacity of wax with the transparency of glass. Case in point: one of Norton’s most recent pieces, featuring a large transparent oval anchored by a marble-like hunk of wax.
A large wax hexagon with a “wide zebra” succulent. Norton has configured multiples of these in an installation called “The Golden Ratio.” Sometimes the plant parts “have fallen out or died out,” she says, leaving a mysterious, fossil-like absence.
Norton shoots all of her studio images with her Toyo Monorail 4×5 large-format camera. It lets her capture great detail and a real sense of space — you can get lost in the photographs if you look long enough. Both her photography and her sculpture play around with depth and dimension, inspired by the Light and Space movement of California artists in the ’60s and ’70s, whose work dealt with sensory perception, and who used light itself as a material.
A box of various organic materials, including the tail of an animal Norton bought in Steuben, WI, while she was at ACRE, a decayed peel of an orange she painted black, pieces of dead cactus shells, moss, and beeswax candles.
Norton holding an Aloe Vera plant, which she uses frequently in her sculptures. She notes that it’s found only in cultivation, and its associations with herbal medicine and sunburn-soothing properties echo currents in her work. When Norton gets into “full production mode, sometimes the studio looks more like a nursery than it does a workspace,” she says.
Norton is currently gearing up for a show in November at Mark Wolf Contemporary Art in San Francisco and one next year at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago.
Upcoming work
As a four-year-old living in Lenoir, South Carolina, Stephen Eichhorn refused to learn how to read. While everyone else in his class was singing their ABCs, he’d stubbornly deemed it unnecessary — he already knew he was destined to be an artist, communicating through images rather than words.
Visit Nick van Woert’s massive studio in Greenpoint, and in all likelihood you’ll find a cluster of white people standing in a corner, naked and clutching each others’ butts — these artificial neo-classical statues have been a recurring theme in the Nevada-born artist’s work since shortly after he began his career in earnest in 2006. Many of them get tipped over and enveloped in a cascade of colored resin that hardens in mid-drip; in one series, he hollowed out their midsections and let the wind give them garbage guts. “It was like a little trap, and the wind would blow weird shit in there that accumulated outside my studio,” van Woert says. “Anything from Doritos bags to Monster Energy drink cans. The DNA of the world outside.” It was his most literal manifestation of the mantra that drives most of his practice: You are what you eat.
Portland is a place where, so the saying goes, the ’90s are alive and well. And it may very well be the only place that could have spawned an artist like Emily Counts, who deals with the self-reflective nostalgia of outdated technological innovations once found in her childhood home: dial-up telephones sculpted in porcelain and stoneware, a life-size fax machine, an interactive Mac SE computer made from walnut, casting epoxy, glass, porcelain, copper, and electrical wiring that acts as a two-way mirror after a button is pressed on the keyboard, lighting up the sculpture’s interior. “I’m interested in the mystery of these inventions that we seem to take for granted in our everyday life,” says the 35-year-old Seattle native, who we first spotted on photographer Carlie Armstrong’s blog Work.Place. “For me, there’s a thin line between technology and magic.”
