HERE OR THERE 2019

HERE OR THERE is a collection of paintings and video performance/installation works. The works poetically challenge, subvert, and explore ideas surrounding the nature of ‘being’ human/woman and the roles society and traditions impose upon us.
“HERE OR THERE” refers to the common themes in the work of identity, roles, senses of self, and boundaries between self and the physical spaces that we encounter as we move through our space timeline.

Inside the Virtual Reality headset is the 360 world ‘Bang Bang Bang’ – a performance video about a group of women restoring the lost matriarch. The film explores the consumption and disregard of the female in contemporary society. We meet the women of the world, the numerical Eves, their cemented, abandoned environment, feels surreal. The ‘Eves’ are examined and instructed by the ‘Lifeguard King’. Finally, one of the Eves overthrows him and restores the lost matriarchy, returning the balance.

Hearn addresses the gallery space experience with layers, much like the multidimensional layered nature of her work. Moving through the gallery, the viewer is invited to move through, or down into, the layers of self, of woman and into the psyche. The over use of the colour pink is a tool to bring attention to the imposition this colour has placed on women and all that the colour represents in society.

The idea of place trauma and history, is also present in her work, and how it connects to the body and sense of identity.
The single channel video ‘Lands Bride’ is shot on location in drought affected Duri, Tamworth, NSW, where both her great grandmother, grandmother and her mother lived and where many years of farming women have experienced trauma and drought. The dress she wears was sewn by her mother in the 80’s. It is a ritualistic performance, making peace with that place and all that a rural country town imposes on women. Hearn acknowledges and pays recognition to the effect the British invasion and farming has had upon the Kamilaroi nation, whose land this piece was shot on.

Are you in there is a Video that engages the junctions between technology and the future, hope and abandonment, the beautiful and the Emptiness, of human experience. It is also an exploration into confinement, the body and the senses.

Hearn’s paintings are a further depiction of these explorations, expressing these constraints and bodily restrictions through their visual language, which is often bordering between abstraction and representational painting. She often draws imagery from her videos, utilising the abandoned and empty spaces/landscapes which reflect the often-felt emptiness within the human condition.