Each of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s acrylic paintings begins as a written story. Even if the viewer isn’t able to know every detail of her narratives, the painter’s work gives us the chance to piece her myths ourselves. The artist offers some personal reasons why this process is so integral to her practice:
“I am an adoptee whose records were sealed at birth, meaning I wasn’t permitted access to my own biographical information,” she says. “In the absence of even basic knowledge of my background, storytelling became an important outlet. In storytelling the narrator is all-knowing and in complete control of the facts—the beginning, middle, and end. Storytelling puts me in charge in a way I cannot be otherwise. It’s from this perspective I make paintings—autobiographical mythologies combining what I know about myself with what I don’t. In a sense, creating and recording my own history. The narratives address loneliness, separation, and otherness, as well as the traumas of secrecy within the family unit.”
See more on Heimer’s site.
