Heather Beardsley is a visual artist that creates work blending art, science, and environmental issues. Beardsley received her MFA in fiber from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and her BA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She spent a year in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects Artist Fellowship in Lower Saxony, Germany. Some residencies include KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv; and La Box in Bourges, France.  Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands. Her first solo museum exhibition, Heather Beardsley: Strange Plants, is on view at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA until October 29th, 2023.

In 2017, I visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone, witnessing how over the past thirty years, nature that was destroyed by human hubris and incompetence has grown up to dominate the abandoned man-made structures. Since that trip, I have sought out ruins and abandoned structures as a source of inspiration, and my travels have taken me to abandoned hospitals, prison complexes, and Soviet military bases. For me, these places are a form of intergenerational communication, passing on information from the past and posing questions about what messages our ruins will send to those that come after us. Through this lens, I make speculative images and sculptures of potential distant futures where the balance between the built and natural world has shifted. Look- ing at my work, I want people to ask: Can the damage we’ve done be reversed? What will the world look like without us? And how long will evidence of our civilizations remain? The materi- als and processes I use in my work reinforce these concepts, allowing them to resonate on a deeper level.

Exhibition:

In The Middle With You