Heidi Mortensen

Fire destroyed my family home initiating an artistic exploration of the complex connections we have to place, specifically those we consider “home”. My sculptural work probes the interplay between place, memory, and the embodied experience within the framework of home, addressing displacement and loss. Erasure of a place central to my feelings of connection and belonging was a catalyzing event prompting me to examine these foundational associations and how being unmoored from them leaves us within the realm of memory; a mutable, fragmentary, and unreliable place. 

 My mixed-media sculpture incorporates plaster, metal, wood, and personal items including ash and remnants from the house fire. Impermanent or fragile materials such as glass, fabric, and thread reference the fleeting nature of our states of being and the vulnerable quality of memory. Connection and the desire to hold or preserve are concepts that reappear in my work. I place importance on the means of connection, whether a tenuous balancing or excessive wrapping. The physical acts of wrapping, coiling, or twisting that I employ are a way to connect and hold, encase, and preserve.  
Memory, Place, and the Body, as interwoven aspects of our lived experience, create a latticework for investigating ourselves, our history, and stories we construct. Examining ways we create and hold connection to place, how embodied experiences frame our remembering, and the narratives we construct around these memories, creates a complex picture of the interconnectedness of ourselves with place and the trauma of loss and displacement. Synthesizing my personal experiences within my practice is a way to understand my history and look outward, to connect with the experiences of others. Within the context of the contemporary world’s ongoing disaster of displaced persons I find wider relevance in the investigation of how home and place play a crucial role in our lives.

Heidi Mortensen is a mixed media sculptor originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i and now residing in Western New York.  She investigates themes of loss, connection to place, and memory through work combining materials as varied as glass, metal, plaster, resin, fabric, thread, found and personal objects.  

Mortensen received a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Hawai’i and MFA in the Sculpture Dimensional Studies Program at Alfred University, New York. In between these two degrees she pursued atelier training in figure sculpting at the Barcelona Academy of Art to deepen her understanding of the architecture of the human body.   

Her work has been included in Artworks Northwest Biennial Exhibit at the Umpqua Valley Arts Association (Roseburg, OR), and Women Artists Making Their Mark at O’Hanlon Center for the Arts (Mill Valley, CA), and was awarded first place at Slice, A Juried Cross-Section of Regional Art by Pence Gallery (Davis CA). Mortensen has pieces in private collections in San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu.