Press
Burnaway
"In the Studio with Heather Bird Harris"
E.C. Flamming
April 8, 2025
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"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."
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ARTS ATL
"Review: Heather Bird Harris sees the Earth’s future at Spalding Nix"
Noah Reyes
February 13, 2025
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"As grave and ominous a reality as the works imply, they offer an equally radiant and stunning image of what could be. All together love as large as grief demands is a spectacular culmination of environmental investigation and personal reflections presented in a concise and considered manner that should not fall on deaf ears."
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Tulane University
"Art of waning spaces: The role of materials in imagining coastal climate change" Ada Evans, Master's Thesis, Department of Art History
2024
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"Harris's process demonstrates how cartography, material affordances, and movement can evoke the increasing fluidity of land and sea along the coastline... The chapter aims to uncover the impacts of including the tangible material being lost due to anthropogenic climate change, i.e. the land, in its representation. Moreover, placing her work in conversation with contemporary eco pigment artists like Cara Despain (b. 1983) and Hans Haacke (b. 1936) demonstrates methods in which Harris's artworks build upon an art historical precedence of employing soil, earth or land in artistic practice to access latent memory held by matter."
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"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."
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ART PAPERS
"The Perpetual Almost: Atlanta Art Week and the Atlanta Art Fair"
EC Flamming
Fall 2024
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"Notable [works] included Aineki Traverso’s The Middle Distance, a painting installation that could be viewed only at a distance, via viewfinder, and Heather Bird Harris’ decomposition (fertile ground for new shapes), a watercolor and video installation made from the dust of the site’s surrounding brick walls."
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NPR
"These artists have something to say about the environment. They're using Louisiana dirt to do so"
Halle Parker, WWNO
January 18, 2023
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"Part of her practice revolves around pointedly breaking away from controlling how the land, or paint, interacts with the water. It’s that attitude of control that instigated the land loss in the first place, she said, referring to the construction of levees that cut off the Mississippi River from the rest of the system. That action in the 1900s set the land loss crisis in motion."
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Artist/Mother Podcast
"Mothering and Art Making During Our Climate Crisis"
September 12, 2023
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"Can our interconnectedness inspire us towards unity in a time of climate and cultural crisis? Heather Bird Harris is an artist dedicating her life and work towards this effort. Inspired by nature and interested in the human effect on it, Heather has been creating work that responds to and captures the land. From polluted water collected on the banks of the Mississippi River to foraged marigolds, to clay dug up from her own from yard, Heather uses site specific materials to explore behavior, change, reaction and flow."
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ARTS ATL
"Cullum’s Notebook: Diverse group exhibits explore the South’s many identities"
Review of Collective Telling, curated by Heather Bird Harris and Jennifer Williams
by Jerry Cullum
February 7, 2024
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"The exhibit features an extraordinary collection of 19 Southern-born or Southern-rooted artists. By curatorial design, most of them are based in or have roots in New Orleans and Atlanta. These artists find visually engaging ways to explore diverse topics, from Shana M. griffin’s previously untold stories of Black women displaced from housing in New Orleans and Hannah Chalew’s recycled-component works on paper symbolic of environmental issues surrounding the Crescent City to Jeffery Darensbourg’s poems written in the indigenous language of Ishakkoy..."
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Creative Fuel
"Using Dirt to Paint a Larger Picture of Place and Memory"
Anna Brones
April 21, 2023
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"Art and science are simply different ways of making sense of the world around us,” says [wetland ecologist] Ashley Booth. “Both are processes that we use to understand what is important to us, what we value.”
What I find particularly poignant about Harris's work is her focus on memory. It’s a potent source for her—addressing how we tell our collective stories of history and events, and what the memory of land can tell us our communities and ourselves. As Heather and I talked, Summer Praetorius’ piece on land memory in Nautilus came to mind: “In the biosphere, resilience is deeply entwined with memory—it is the ability of a system to find its way back to an equilibrium state following a perturbation, which requires memory of previous states.” We must remember. We must engage. We must connect. Art is a tool for doing just that."
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Wild Pigment Project
'Lu Kailash' Four-Way Interview with artist Tilke Elkins, artist and writer Jeffery Darrensbourg, and soil scientist Ashley Booth.
Tilke Elkins, Pied Midden no. 40
March 2, 2023
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