Heidi Jackson

Heidi Jackson (born 1970, Freetown, Sierra Leone) experienced an early life shaped by constant movement, with a childhood spent in Aotearoa/New Zealand, France and West Africa. In the mid-1980s, she settled in Kamberri/Canberra, Australia and spent a formative decade there that began to anchor a permanent sense of place.

Her practice is grounded in a deeply personal response to the landscape. Early works reflect a exploration and subjective relationship with the Antipodes. Fleeting impressions and enduring memories are translated into compositions distinguished by expansive skies, bodies of water, winding roads, and the personally significant destinations they lead to.

More recently, her works have become a depiction of an illusory infrastructure that both underlies and overlays the landscape. This process engages a range of invented visual codes, ones informed by extemporaneity, joyful incidence and graphic discoveries. The canopy of trees, stippling like rain, the blurring of fence lines into shelter belts, the sense of being underwater as above ground transgress the boundary between memory, reality and the imagination.

Jackson’s work will always have its central intention in a depiction of the landscape. The qualities although indicative of imagined patterns, colours and linear marks, refer to sensations, space, and forms that are deeply felt and known. The density and impenetrable thickets of trees are juxtaposed with tilled fields, vast, empty skies, the descent of mountains into plains, networks of growth, and an attempted organisation of the beautiful disorder of the natural world.

Her images can invoke the stresses and upheavals of our times. Yet simultaneously the images convey the endurance and reliability of the landscape, communicating how its permanence acts as a metaphor for home, connection and belonging.

She currently lives and works on Wangal Country, Sydney, Australia

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