Four watercolour paintings on wooden boards, the Shadowscape series explores Heaney’s so-called shadow self through various perspectives. Investigating shadow is important as when it is not fully integrated, we tend to project it onto others and nature.
Heaney’s paintings were presented alongside three paintings by JMW Turner as part of Heaney’s solo exhibition Shadowscapes: Heaney, JMW Turner and Quantum at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham (West London).
Through sketching, coding, writing and movement, Heaney used the three Turner paintings as portals to access her hidden depths, particularly the repressed parts of herself she tries to hide.
Each of the paintings has concealed text on the back that Heaney has written as part of her attempt to uncover her shadow. She painted these while listening to her accompanying sound installation Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) (2025).
As with previous series, Heaney paints on flat surfaces with watercolour. Each layer she applies partly dissolves the previous layers, inviting audiences to think of the self as quantum, where nothing is truly stable.
As she paints, puddles of water form on the surface like little petri dishes where unpredictable magic happens.
For the first time, Heaney has painted on wooden board instead of paper. During the process, the paint resists attachment to the wood. It sits on the surface, creates deeper puddles, pours over the edges and easily moves around, mirroring the difficulty observing both shadow and quantum.
Heaney is inspired in myriad ways by the Turner paintings. His portrayal of nature, how he paints faces simplistically, the movement of invisible forces, his play of light and dark and how depicted ‘objects’ blur into each other. These elements find their way into Heaney’s paintings in various ways, creating inner landscapes that are part of nature: wild and unruly.
The three JMW Turner paintings are: The Vision of Jacob’s (?) Ladder (c1830), The Hero of a Hundred Fights (1847) and Rocky Bay with Figures (1828), telling the story of belief systems, technology and nature as psychological landscapes.
