Heather Bird Harris is an artist, curator, education leader, and writer whose work investigates alternative ways of knowing that make emergence and systems change more possible. Known for materially grounded and place-based works across painting, film, and social practice, Harris blends abstraction with communal, scientific, and more-than-human archives to examine the entanglements of Western knowledge systems and ecological crisis.
Harris is the recipient of fellowships at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, The Golden Foundation, The Hambidge Center, and the Art & Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University. Recent exhibitions include the New Mexico State University Museum, Louisiana State University, Stoveworks (Chattanooga, TN), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, SC), with upcoming exhibitions at the Fine Arts Center (Austin, TX), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Portland, OR), and Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been featured in Burnaway, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, and NPR. Harris’s practice is grounded in over fifteen years in education leadership, where she used arts integration to lead schools and developed anti-racist history curriculum. Harris holds a BA in Art History from Skidmore College, an MA in Education Leadership from Columbia University, and an MFA from Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she lives with her partner and their two children.
artist statement
I grew up on the coast of New England in a town that has lost over 50 feet of shore in my lifetime. As an adult, I fell in love in New Orleans and started my family there before moving to Georgia after Hurricane Ida. Both of these heart-homes exist on an edge we have since retreated from as each place’s relationship with water has become more perilous. My work translates these geologic shifts into an embodied scale that I can emotionally handle, containing equal parts love and grief.
I work across painting, printmaking, film, and social practice, often beginning with a particular place and following the histories, materials, and more-than-human lives embedded within it. Through research and collaboration with scientists and place-keepers, my work teaches me how landscapes hold the traces of human decisions over time, whose knowledge has been preserved or dismissed, and what other ways of knowing might make emergence and systems change more possible. I pay close attention to biomimetic relationships that model how to live in a rapidly changing climate, exist sustainably in edge-places, and mother into possibilities for repair.
Heather Bird Harris’s work explores climate crisis, activism, and grief through cross-sector collaborations and use of natural materials. Much of her artistic practice involves in-depth research of specific places and vegetation, as well as partnerships with historians, ecologists, and botanists to further ‘map’ and reveal the relationships between ecosystems and histories of industrialization and colonization. Her site-specific materials include watercolors made from clay and coal, walnut ink, and more recently weathering rind—a material that involves weathering off the ‘rind’ of the soft clay surrounding a hard rock, such as granite. ... Poetic and dreamy, but with an underlying acknowledgement of the climate grief and capitalistic violence that permeates the world today. Harris’s work is as poignant as it is joyful, an emotionally complicated journey into hanging on and letting go.
- EC Flamming, "In the Studio with Heather Bird Harris," Burnaway
Heather Bird Harris enmeshes her work with soil to expose the inherent affordances of the material and invoke memories held by it. Her large-scale works of earth pigment and ink demonstrate how the use of the land has the potential to call forth both the present and predicted effects of sea-level rise through invoking the entangled and oftentimes indistinguishable boundaries between earth and sea. The substance which has born witness to it all is the land itself.
- Ada Evans, "Art of Waning Spaces: The Role of Materials in Imagining Coastal Climate Change" , Tulane University
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
- Baba Dioum, ecologist
