Heather Eastes

Concepts I call my monochrome paintings 'fragment drawings'. Pencil lines are applied to a white ground and obscured or brought out. The images arising from this process are often recurrent and obsessive. Heads, beasts, animals shift shape, travel the mysteries of birth and death. Banal or sublime forms evoke traumas of early relationships. They battle for a sense of being beyond pain and compulsion. From the Fragment Drawings developed the "Paper Faces" , heads made from a slow process of mashing and moulding discarded paper, often combined with found items such as bone or broken pottery, or driftwood. These express the human condition and also recall the sensibility of earliest memory and relationships. Likewise the painted wooden panels, which are sardonic and wistful, their surfaces reminiscent of wooden toys or devotional wooden panel paintings. My work explores our condition and our need for spirituality, community, and our vulnerability as beings conscious of transience and mortality. Influences: Spirituality/Religion, The human figure, Ancient cultures/Myths; own cultural identity (Welsh, European); own gender (Female)Career path Qualifications: 1979 Meisterschuler, State Academy of Arts, Düsseldorf 1974 BA Hons, History and Visual Arts, UCW, Aberystwyth, Wales Teaching Experience: 1979/82 Tutor, Painting and Graphics, Auxiliumschüle, Düsseldorf 1979 Tutor, Graphics, Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf Areas of work: Adult education Exhibiting Private commissions Public art Project management Workshops Collections: Kunstmuseum (Department of 20th century prints and drawings), Düsseldorf, Germany Artothek and Ministry of Culture, Düsseldorf, Germany Deutche Bank Art Collection, Königsallee, Düsseldorf Hank Collection, Düsseldorf