Andrea Heller @ Parafin

Andrea Heller’s work might be characterised as ‘serious play’. She works in a wide range of media, including paintings and drawings on paper and fabric, as well as sculptures in ceramic, plaster and glass, Heller embraces contradictory impulses. Her work evokes a series of dialectics: organic and geometric; inside and outside; ugly and beautiful; playful and threatening; hard and soft. She is interested in the metaphoric implications of her seemingly abstract images and objects, which can be read as bodies, beings, architectural structures, enclosures, or landscapes.

Heller’s choice of title for the exhibition, Inhabit, is suggestive. We inhabit a body but a landscape or architectural structure might also be an ‘habitat’ or ‘inhabitation’. In a further layering, the title might refer to something we do ‘in habit’, i.e. again and again, repetitively, over and over; a possible reflection on the artist’s process.