Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to present Unfolding tenderness as we learn how to feel, a solo exhibition of new work by Colleen Heslin. Delighted and confounded by the material world and what is revealed through our relationship to it, Heslin considers the utility, history and political landscape of everyday structural objects within domestic spaces. These emergent sculptural forms contain gestures of mirroring and connection, fracture and repair that speak to interior and social relationships. Through a range of textures they highlight sensory dichotomies, like soft and hard, strength and fragility, weight and light to open up spectrums of somatic responses and reflections.
Living and working in the northwest coastal woods on the traditional Tla’amin territory in the qathet regional district in British Columbia over the last decade. The brutality of colonial displacement and material extraction is apparent on the land and within the community, as a former mill town built on the original village site. Heslin’s practice reflects the daily labor of stewardship on these lands through the humbling work of observing the natural native habitat, removing invasive plants, managing rot, maintenance, mentorship and alliance with artists and the indigenous community as an uninvited settler guest on their land. Heslin has developed an intimate relationship with the land, revealing the importance of land rights, and sustainable practices of use, care and protection that encompass the personal and political. Pulling out invasive blackberry roots and familiarizing with native plants, trees and animals, the labor and politics of care and space develop a daily rhythm of sustainable balance rooted within the process of decolonization.
This new body of sculpture stem from a daily practice of working with native structural wood, specifically red cedar and Douglas fir, to maintain and rebuild existing wood-based structures that support and shelter from progressively extreme cold, wet and windy winters on the coast. The cotton in dyed canvas works, wood, rope and burlap are all cellulose fiber-based materials largely utilized as objects to protect the body from external elements through structures and clothing. Expanding forms from Heslin’s established work with colour and fiber-based rope works and paintings, this exhibition echoes familiar concepts of rejected materials and re-purposing off-cuts from their original domestic utility forms morphed into abstraction through attention and material attunement. This body of work mirrors and extends poetics of raw materials in relation to our bodies through methods, materials and concepts of protection, care, play and warmth, ultimately laboring attention and expression literally and metaphorically.
This play within perception and illusion are foundational threads in Heslin’s practice, often initiated through a softness replacing traditionally hard surfaces through texture and/or approach. Heslin provokes questions around how we shape our material world and how does the material world shapes us. Is there potential to deepen our relationship with the natural world? What is our relationship with surface, appearance and consumption? Do our choices reflect or conceal? Material commands our space and time, it can protect, comfort, appease and exhaust us. Are we going through a motion with it, or intentional in our approach. Is it energizing, draining or necessary? Ultimately, this work presents acquainted objects as uncanny, to call attention to details and appreciation to something so familiar that it can be difficult to perceive.