Longing, Mattering (Series), 2024. Watercolour and pencil on paper, various sizes.
A series of four watercolour and pencil works, the Longing, Mattering series invites audiences to consider what it means to be human through the entangling, non-binary lens of quantum physics.
Initially, she depicts imagined forms: open windows, slivering tentacles, spider legs, grasping hands, vibrating phones, falling bottles etc, often working on wet paper so the boundaries of shapes soften and merge.
Heaney starts each painting with a meditation and movement ritual, releasing deeply held emotions – her so-called shadow side.
She then writes a short automatic text, often on the reverse of the paper, which she intuitively responds to by painting and drawing on the flat surface.
To bring the audience into her dreamy, nightmare-ish multiverse, Heaney dissolves the representations through a process of blurring and layering, which reflect quantum phenomenon like superposition and entanglement.
The Longing, Mattering series invites audiences to contemplate the myriad human and non-human entanglements that shape our being.
