Heather Gordon
Heather working in-Studio
“Wow. I feel like I just stood in a 360 mirror under fluorescent lights in a TJ Maxx wearing a bikini two sizes too small.” I had to chuckle when I received Heather’s email after she read our interview for the first time.
How perfectly she captured how scary and uncomfortable it can be to put yourself out there. Yet, I am finding again and again that it is in doing just that that we are finally able to step into the sunlight.
Heather, thank you for sharing your art and your story with us. Vulnerability looks damn good on you!
Elizabeth Mathis Cheatham: Gosh, we’ve talked about doing this for such a long time, I’m excited to finally go!
Heather Gordon: I’m concerned I’m not gonna remember all the wonderful answers that…
EMC: You gave previously?
HG: Yeah, that made you want to do this in the first place! I’m gonna be a dummy.
EMC: No way! Okay. Before we met, I seemed to have had an outdated assumption that people were either creative or analytical. I kept the arts separated from things like science and math. Yet, that couldn’t be further of the truth with you and your work. Could you speak to how these work together in your work, or how you view the relationship between the two, if you separate them at all?
HG: I did separate them. I separated them almost my entire working career. I separated them, and did that because I was being told to do so by my instructors, by people that I thought knew more than I knew. I was listening to them because I like to listen to what people say; I think they know from experience. I was always told, ‘What are you—are you a head painter or are you a heart painter?’ I would hear that one a lot from my professor. ‘Cause it looks to me like you’re a head painter.’ He didn’t say it in a way like that was something to celebrate. So I tried to be a heart painter, and I did, and that’s how I progressed. I always loved numbers but had a separate career for that.
I loved computer science since I was a little kid. The idea of elegance in code got me as excited as any other form of beauty that I can perceive. The elegance and simplicity, the functionality of a recursion in code is so beautiful! But I kept that part of my life separate.
But then, as life proceeded, I had kind of a prompt given to me from a friend that got me thinking about math and numbers and language in a soft, squishy way. It got me thinking about things I had always thought were very much, 1+1=2 always, black and white, binary— that it isn’t that way, that it’s very soft, that numbers and math, geometry and such—while they appear to be hard-edged and finite and discreet, they’re not. It’s all in your perception of it.
At some point, I just let go of this prior idea about whether or not you’re a heart painter or a head painter. I decided that that binary is just as mushy as the binaries that I was looking at that were mushy… That was just an opinion that was doing me no service. It was holding me back from what felt really good to do, and that was a heart-felt decision. Before that, I was just doing what I was being told, but when I started doing what actually felt good to my heart, I started making heady work.
EMC: I love that. How do you personally decide if one of your works is a success?
HG: Hmm… You just know it. You know it. I don’t know how you know that. Not all of them are that way. There are only a few works that I have deemed in the artist’s collection. Those are the works that keep telling me over and over again how fabulous they are. They just keep resisting me wanting to be critical about them and year after year, decade after decade, some of these, they’re just like—wow! I don’t even know how I did that. I don’t know how I achieved that. It doesn’t feel like I did it. Maybe that’s partly how I do measure success because when I’m making the piece, I often feel very moved to make it and am unaware of why or how until I start it. I feel that we’ve entered a conversation—that it’s guiding me to do a thing. Sometimes I actually do see some sort of—I don’t want to say it’s a hallucination, I don’t want to say it’s a vision, I’m not quite sure what it is, but I do hear or see the next step. Sometimes I get some dreams about things or what to make but not typically. Typically, it happens in real time at my studio, at my desk, after I’m already a few hours into it. I’m completely “zenned out” and totally relaxed, nothing electronic going on. Then something happens and it shows me what to do, and I do it. I just abide. I do feel that way. I abide. I don’t judge. I just do the thing that it’s asking me to do, and then it tells me when I’ve been successful. I feel like it says at some point, “Okay, thank you… Let’s do the next one.”
EMC: They do take on a life of their own…
HG: They do. They have a life. Right. On the first few marks, I’m very much being told to do a thing to bring it to life, and I feel very much more like the control, like I’m being asked to build something. Once I get to a certain point in the work, and it’s pretty early on—I’d say it’s in the first quarter part of the time that it takes to generate a piece, it starts getting that—that voice starts talking; it has a life at that point. It starts talking to me and then we go back and forth, back and forth, and all that stuff. A lot of times the conversations are—sometimes I get angry at the work, because I want it to go somewhere else and sometimes I force it to and uh, I’m always proven wrong—shown that I don’t know, and then I have to suffer the “told you sos.” The work starts saying, “See, I told you so! Now see? Would you just do what I’m asking you to do? Just do the thing. Just shut up and do the thing.” So I do that and then when I get to the end, I go, “Oh yeah! Okay. Thank you.” I think the thank you’s really important, that at the end of it you have some gratitude for that piece that came through, which then lends itself to me making some other pieces.
If you look at my collected works, you’ll see that I don’t typically work in a long series, because I can’t squash my own voice after a certain while. Because then I think I’ve figured it out. I think I’m so smart about my own work that I get it, and then at that point it starts getting stale, and that’s when it’s not successful anymore. When I’m not listening at all and I’m doing it from stem to stern, from all 100% of the process and not even hearing the voice anymore, then that’s it. That’s the last one I’m doing. I have to know that I don’t know where I’m going. That’s really important, or else I’m making way too many choices and they’re all wrong. I mean, the work shows. It shows it’s stale at the end. It’s like oh, okay. I’ve merely made something that’s handsome. I haven’t made anything that’s going to make you cry. It’s not going to show you something you hadn’t thought of before or give you some feeling that’s overwhelming in some way. It’s not gonna take you to a new place. It’s just gonna be a thing.
Chrysalis—a mapping of personal change in intervals.
Heather Gordon
EMC: Speaking of a work that will make you cry, that was a response of mine when I first saw your drawing of “Chrysalis—a Mapping of Personal Change in Intervals.” It now hangs in Matrons & Mistresses’ office. I loved it before knowing any of the story behind it. I was so drawn to it. Then, in hearing what led you to creating that work, it became even deeper for me. Can you share a little bit about that painting, about the story it embodies and your process in creating it?
HG: So that piece in particular was focused around what I perceived to be a tragedy in my love life: that I had found what I thought was a true love connection and something of great value to me, and it was taken away. In my mind, it was taken away. Really I would say it never really existed. But at the time, I was feeling loss around it—I still feel loss around it, who am I kidding? But I know that that’s just a function of my own thinking; that’s not because it’s true.
So I started thinking about this idea of a chrysalis because we don’t know what that is. It’s one of nature’s black boxes. There’s only like ten of them in the world of things we truly just have no idea what’s going on, and that’s one of them. And I’m fascinated by that! It’s one of those unattainables, one of those unknowables. We’re just never gonna know how that caterpillar just turns into goo, into nothing, into just protein soup—nothing! And yet when it comes out as a moth or butterfly, there’s memory. Well, where was that? There’s memory? Where? There’s no structure in there. That idea that the “me” persists through all of that; it’s still not the end—that is one of the most miraculous, unexplainable, comforting things ever to someone who’s going through what they feel is tragic. And it’s not tragic. It’s just painful. Just like a plant, when it wants to bloom, it puts all of its resource into doing that and when it does finally burst open, you know that shit hurts. To form a bud and put all your self into it—that hurts. Then it opens up—that hurts. Then it has to let go of its seeds and die—that hurts. All of it hurts. There’s nothing wrong with that, nor is it tragic.
So, I did this origami mapping. I wanted to see the shape of my pain; I wanted to see the shape of my change…to see the shape of my goo, my protein-rich soup that’s carrying forward the “me-ness” that’s going to come later. I wanted to celebrate instead of cry.
EMC: Or do both.
HG: Yeah, it’s okay. So I looked at all these voice recordings that I had made over a year’s period of time. I was thinking about how they’ve experimented on chrysalises to try to understand them. What they do is they let them develop, and then they slice them open and take a look inside at various stages to see what’s going on. So I was thinking about these intervals, not so much the cutting open and looking in, but how much time elapses in between those and between the intervals where I peer in to see if I can understand it.
So I was mapping the number of days in between voice recordings I was making, where I was describing this emotional trauma I was experiencing and psychological combativeness to my own self, just vigorously not wanting to let this go and using it as a weapon to hurt myself and keep myself emotionally in absolute utter turmoil. Through this whole process, instead of letting it happen, I kept slicing myself open to try to understand it. I wanted to document my emotional shift in a beautiful way and make these shapes, so I could see it and experience it in some sort of a totemic way. I wanted that end product to be something I could look at and feel with great joy… That this process had started and ended and that I didn’t need to know everything. Chrysalis is made up of all the intervals, it’s made up of all that yearning of wanting to know what’s going on so I didn’t feel so lost in the uncertainty of all of it, but it all ends up in the same place: you bloom. Heartache and disillusionment change you in some way, and you persist through the whole process. It’s all okay.
EMC: Yes, it really is all okay, but goodness, can that process hurt! You’ve worked in a lot of different mediums—is there one you enjoy the most, and with which do you think you’ll be working most frequently in the future?
Heather working in-Studio
HG: Painting. It’s painting, because it seems the simplest. It seems the closest to nature—it’s some dried stuff of the world mixed with some oil, put on a surface. There’s a lot of technicality and you can go off the deep end learning about all that stuff, and I have. I’ve gone down that rabbit hole. But for the most part, it’s just you and the wet stuff on your brush, pushing against the surface that’s giving you some resistance or giving you a container, which, I like that. I like having a boundary; I really like a container… It settles me and helps me focus my intention.
With painting, you can just keep reworking that puppy over and over and over again until you get it right. It’s like being able to edit yourself after you’ve said that stupid thing at the party! You get as many take-backs as you want and I love that. I do. And I like that surface, the building up of that thin surface over time. Every passing session is in there, and I know if I worked a long session or a deep one that took hours or days, could be, or it could be just ten minutes that I got in there, and I can see it. It’s like a little bit of a landscape there for me. Personally, I remember it. People don’t get that—I can’t read that in somebody else’s work because I didn’t make it. But I think that’s good, and I find it infinitely challenging. Because it doesn’t have a lot of limits, there’s so much that can be said with it! What I find in painting is that I’m butt up against my own boundaries all the time, my limits… My little brain is stupid.
EMC: Says the smartest person I know.
HG: I simply cannot think big enough and I love it! I love it that I am made small by painting over and over again, every time I go to it. I think that’s why when I was in college, I shifted into art and into painting in particular, because I felt it would be the most challenging thing I could do with my life.
There’s something about the longevity combined with the elasticity of painting that just makes me all in for it, while I do love to explore other media too. But mostly I do those so I can collaborate with other people. Painting for me is an individual effort. I’ve yet to find a collaborative way to paint. It’s just too much—I get way too lost in that interior space when I’m painting to hear any other voice. I don’t even hear my own voice, much less someone else’s. I only hear the painting talking to me; I don’t hear anything else.
EMC: I’m probably gonna have to edit this out, but you make it sound very sexy.
HG: It is sexy. It’s totally sexy. I think it’s totally fine to say that when you’re painting you’re ravished by it, if you’re doing it right, over and over and over again. It just keeps giving and it doesn’t really ask for a whole lot except your total vulnerability, but it will never use it against you which seems to me the ideal lover, really.
It doesn’t make any judgments on you; it doesn’t offer any criticisms of you—you’re the one who does that! When the work’s done, it doesn’t tell you it sucks—it’s just happy to be alive! It’s grateful to you for making it. It doesn’t ask of anything from you; it doesn’t need you to validate it or invalidate it— be judgmental. It doesn’t require that. We do that!
EMC: I remember one afternoon you said something that I continue to go back to again and again: “It’s not about being the best, the smartest, or the most talented. It’s about showing up for your art again and again. It is about commitment and persistence.” Can you speak to that?
Heather working in-Studio
HG: I can talk about that. Yes. I think about Hank Aaron a lot. You could look up his batting average and his home run average and all this stuff. It’s amazing! It’s astounding. Some of his records still stand today. The secret to his success—there were two things that I took away from it. One is that after practice when everybody went home, he continued to practice another two hours. He did it every day. Every day without fail. He hit his 10,000 hours of practice very early. Then the second thing was that he didn’t swing at everything. He knew when to swing because he spent so much time with his work it became intuitive.
When you look at the stories and biographies of people, which I love to do, and you ask them the secret to their success, they’ll tell you, “Oh I was doing it ever since I was a child.” Or, they’ll say something like, “I couldn’t stop myself; that’s all I did day and night.” For a long time what I took away was, ‘Oh, they were obsessed with their work. They had some sort of obsession.’ No, they just were working all the time. I remember growing up, my mom would say to me, “You have so much talent in lots of areas. You could do pretty much any career you wanted to do. But the problem you have is discipline. Self-discipline.” Now, she thinks I’m one of the most disciplined people that she knows. I have that little voice in the back of my mind, ‘Oh, I’ve worked really hard and I’m exhausted… Can you do a little bit more? Can you do a little bit more? Can you do ten more minutes? Can you get it to the next spot where it resolves until you stop today?’ I think there’s— a lot of times, there’s an effort on my part to work that extra two hours after practice like Hank Aaron.
I might get hurt for a while, I might stop for a bit, but I’m ultimately not gonna stop. I might have doubts, and I do have a lot of doubts and I suffer from imposter complex all the time. Sometimes I cry about it and sit on my pity pot and then get up and do it again. Just do it again. Just keep doing it. What else am I gonna do?
Plus, I just love the exhaustion of work—of a good work day, feeling like I’ve worked my ass off.
Small Talk
Heather Gordon
EMC: You’ve mentioned your mom—a couple years back she gave you a Christmas present that then became another avenue for creating art…
HG: What was that?
EMC: A New York Times subscription.
HG: Oh yeah. Right. Right.
EMC: I love these. We have some pictures of them. Can you speak a little bit about this series titled Small Talk?
HG: I look at the news on the front page, and I think about that editor who’s looking at it. I think to myself that that’s their canvas. They have something very specific they want to say. They’re using all of these stories and all of these words and all of these pictures to lead me down the garden path of understanding what it is they want me to understand about the world, in the way that they see it or would wish I would see it. You cannot help but be biased.
There’s a power struggle just in the way the words are chosen and structured. I black out or white out or color out all the other words and leave the ones I think are important and try to show you the thing that I’m seeing when I read it, which again is a subjective take; none of it is objective. Some of those are facts, but it’s a lot like numbers and equations—it’s a fact, but what does it mean? I don’t know what it means, and I don’t think they really know what it means either. They’re kind of slanting and hinting at what they think it means and I’m also doing the same thing, but ultimately you have to decide what it is that you see.
I give the page a title that somewhat alludes to whatever it is that has been my takeaway from that. Sometimes, granted, I’m more angry than I imagine an editor would be. I’m a lot more pointed. It’s a fine edge. I imagine that that job, editor for the front page of the New York Times, is very challenging and super exciting.
EMC: One thing that I really appreciate about your work is that you’re drawn to so many different themes and ideas. You have created work around the moons on Jupiter and around Monsanto and atomic properties…
HG: The BP oil spill, that was more than one. Musical intervals too. Made a lot with that.
EMC: Recently your residency with Duke and the forestry archives—while they’re different ideas, can you speak to some of the themes that you see repeated throughout your work and what draws your attention?
HG: I like complexity because I think it’s fiction. I think the complexity is just the pretty face of it, that there’s something more simple at the heart of it—and that’s the thing I’m curious about. I am looking for the interrelatedness hidden within systems.
EMC: We have spoken a lot around so many things about creating art that you love and what brings you joy within that. Is there—what is the biggest challenge or struggle about being an artist? Like if you had—
HG: Finance.
EMC: That was fast!
HG: Period. Finance. There’s not a whole lot to add there…
In my perfect world, I would simply get paid a salary and my work would go out in the world to do whatever it needs to do. To me, I just want to make the work. I just want to get up every day and make the fucking stuff. I don’t listen to a voice that says, ‘Make this piece because it’s going to sell for a lot of money and you need to make money.’ The minute I start thinking like that, I start making shit work. I’ve been there. I’ve tried that. That’s not my job.
Unless you’re in that very top echelon and I’m sure those folks have different challenges… If you’re kind of where I am, paying your mortgage is very difficult. It puts a lot of pressure on me, because it makes me doubt that what I’m doing is the right thing I should be doing with my life. It makes me feel irresponsible. It makes me feel like a loser, like I’m not providing for my life, I’m not providing for my family because I want to make these fucking pictures every day. Yet, I cannot deny that people have had real additive experiences with things I’ve made. I know it.
EMC: Because they have.
HG: I’ve seen it enough times to know. And I don’t need to touch everyone in the world but if I can make some sort of additive difference to someone’s life one time, that’s huge!
Heather Gordon’s Studio
EMC: Yes, it is huge! In preparing some questions, there was so much I wanted to ask and so many things that I thought of. Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you think is important within your art that you wanted to share?
HG: I’m gonna say there’s maybe an observation I would make and it’s something I hadn’t expected. I heard it from other people that were further down the path, but I don’t think I understood what they were saying because I hadn’t experienced it. The better you get at this job, the more isolated you become. Part of it has to do with the kind of society we live in. I think very differently about the entirety of my life, very differently than most people do, and it’s hard for other people to understand me. They get the wrong idea about me a lot. I see that happen and it’s not my job to explain myself. The more I become—the better I become at making, the more I truly become me in all the weirdnesses that are me, and there’s a lot of them that are very different and strange, and that’s okay because it makes me better at my art.
I think I’m aptly named. I hated my name forever. I felt like it didn’t express me very well, but it expresses who I am perfectly. I am a flowering plant in a rocky, unforgiving land; I refuse to die and the adversity somehow fuels me. I’m not looking to change the system anymore. I’m very much looking to work with certain people within the system, like yourself. Because you see the imperfections in it too, but we can still find places to live. You can help me find that little rocky ledge that I can cling to and proliferate in this little patch. Somehow Little Heather can stay in the studio and make art as much as she can and know that she’s got this little safety zone.
I don’t think artists talk very much about their isolation—about how odd we feel and how it’s difficult to become good at this job as it is. I have to be okay with knowing that in order to get better, I’m going to become even more strange to get there. And, that’s really hard. ‘Cause ultimately we all just want to be liked; I want people to like me. I want to be understood and I want to feel a sense of belonging… I’m finding that I can’t look to greater society for that, nor can I be angry about that because that’ll keep me from growing. It is isolating. I hate that this seems to be true… So that’s my observation.
EMC: I’m glad that you let me into the inner circle and you continue to make your art. I’ll come to the ledge anytime.
HG: I’m kind of in for a penny and for a pound now. I’m past those years. If I was 30, I could still contemplate a career change but right now, it doesn’t make any logical sense for me to try to do anything else in life. I’m most equipped in experience and just mental composition and psychology to do what I do now. So I’m gonna have to figure out a way to make a living or make it sustainable in some way because honestly, I can’t do anything else any better than I do this. And I love it—why would I want to do anything else? I literally want to make art every minute of the day. Every minute of the day.