Currently studying Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Sienna Heasley (b. 2006) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Pittsburgh area with a primary focus on painting and 2D media.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My primary pursuit in creating work is to visualize the mindscape, and most essentially, to personify the mind. I like to think of imagination and introspection as happening in intangible yet real spaces, and it's these spaces that I pull from as subject matter. These landscapes being as ineffable as they are, it is difficult to capture in words the subliminal experiences and thoughts that are assumed to be singular to the individual psyche. I endeavor to translate these experiences into a collective visual language; I feel that even the most incidental and personal thoughts and musings could be familiar to many, or at least that a visual representation of a thought from one individual mind could speak to the thoughts of another. I often think about the mind as holding realities that transcend the physical. We familiarize ourselves with ideas beyond physical reality via comparison with the tangible. Coming to understand our own minds or the minds of one another might occur through the same process. I often find that the figure is the best vehicle by which to translate that which is latently felt, those thoughts that evade language altogether. The body’s way of using form and movement to express feelings beyond words is an ability I try to reproduce in my own artmaking. Typically blending representational portraiture and abstraction, my work aims to visualize introspection through use of vivid color and visual maximalism. I hope to capture the chaos and frenetic qualities of emotional processing in this way. Often drawing parallels to nature, I further explore how balance and harmony can exist alongside chaos in the mind, just as patterns can exist within mutable and untamable natural environments. While seemingly unpredictable, just as in nature, much that occurs within the mind can be described, translated, and understood through a revelry in the maelstrom.
EMAIL: siennadrawn@icloud.com