Born of North Frisian and Scottish parents in Yorkshire England, Heidi immigrated to Australia in the 1970’s. Her verdant childhood in England, Germany and South East Asia combined with the raw world of Brisbane in the 70’s and 80’s are all contributing factors in her work to date. Heidi went on to do professional training and graduated in Fine Arts at the Queensland College of Art during its evolving years under Alan Warren’s directorship at Seven Hills.
Since graduating Heidi has worked in the industry as an exhibiting artist and curator but it is in her extensive overseas sojourns to Europe, North and Central America and more recently New Zealand that she has arrived at a source of inspiration that breathes and inhabits her work with a visceral silk with speaks of a soulful landscape reminiscent of the works of Chagall and Ryder with a nod to Caspar David Friedrich.
What has become most evident in the later period of her work is the change in palette; gone are the vibrant and sever colour combinations of her Navajo series and the somnambulist stroke of her Tuscan exhibition. What came was the more monochromatic gradation of tone that we see today.
In New Zealand she explored light and dark with a simplification of form and an affinity with the unique ruggedness and vitality of the coast. To date much of her early symbolism still remains and provides a link between the sacred and the earthly so that we see an arc of a life well-travelled and receptively informed by its traverse.
Heidi continues to draw upon a range of life experiences and emotions; the inner landscape and the outward solitude that we all thrive for or experience when we are amongst nature. Her work embraces a coming together with oneself, a beautiful salute to hope and celebration, a palette that the colours of South East Queensland bleed from on a moonlit night.