Using the language of color, light and form, Heather Stivison explores a more holistic vision of the world. Her work crosses boundaries between disciplines, in particular between her life-long passions for art and science. The daughter of a scientist as well as the mother of a scientist, it is at the nexus of these fields that she has set her stake in the future—that of promoting harmony between humans and the natural world. Literature is an ever-present source material—everything from Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass inform Seeds of Change. 

Stivison’s pictorial worlds teem with life and the beginnings of life… pods, seedlings, whirlybirds from maple trees, DNA strands, dandelion puffs dispersing, a bee, are interspersed with all manner of mark-making, including circles made of hatch-marks, wandering lines, spirals, and other symbols that refer to the artist’s long-time interest in prehistoric rock art and the magical thinking these early expressions of humanity may represent.

Stivison’s paintings have a luminous glow—accomplished by the artist building up layer upon layer of viscous paint, which she pours, smears, scrapes and otherwise manipulates to create fields of color that conjure the watery depths of the ocean or intergalactic space, depending on the palette. Within these spaces her ethereal forms, delicately outlined in white, blues, purples and gold, give off light as they float through the veiled layers of color. There is a sense that you can reach right into the paintings.