New Orleans sculptress Sally Heller.
About the Artist
Sally Heller is a New Orleans based artist. She has a BS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has received artists in residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. For the past five years, Sally has been focusing on building solo installations at venues throughout the United States including Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, Depauw University, Indianna, Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, Montserrat College of Art, MA, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans , Miami University, Ohio and Ohio State University. In the 80’s and 90’s, she lived in New York and was included in shows at PS 1 and White Columns among many others. In 2008, she completed a monumental public sculpture titled ScrapHouse funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In June of 2010 she created the installation A Siren’s Call at the Lousiana Museum of Art and Science and just completed an installation in the entrance of Bergdorf Goodman. She is currently working on a public sculpture for the Atlanta Beltlind and is represented by Gallery Bienvenu in New Orleans and Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta.
Artist Statement
“I have always been fascinated by the expressive potential of mass-marketed products when viewed outside their intended context. What does our culture routinely use and discard, and what can be made from those “low” materials? Among the elements I’ve incorporated in my installations are rubber shoes, plastic plates, netting, beads, buttons, and cardboard. Torn, bent, and seeming so precariously placed, these items come to represent the tenuous state of our environment, even as they are transformed by patient handiwork. I develop site-specific structures that often assume a tree-like configuration. Pipe cleaners, webbing, and plastic products strung like beads are positioned in compositions that stretch upward and cascade down. The tension in my art arises from the disparity between the once-utilitarian materials—which retain their colors and identities as consumer goods—and the highly individualized finished pieces they comprise. There is humor, too, in seeing the (literal and symbolic) elevation of such ephemera. For each new work, I begin with a vision for the site. Discoveries made during the installation process continually refresh and sharpen that initial vision. In an important way, the viewer’s exploration of the completed work recapitulates my unfolding experience of creating the piece. “