Art as an sensory experience. Colour, light, movement can radically shift your perspective and create something other, transporting and immersive. Rave culture has many similarities to extreme natural environments, like snow capped mountains, where states morph between solid-liquid-vapour/snow-lakes-mist/here-there-real-enhanced-altered/blinding-fog-dazed-obscured-darkness-adrenaline. Find yourself reflected in the work. Rauschenberg. It’s not about what the picture is of. Ryman. Aldous Huxley. Marianne Faithfull. Being seen. Choosing to remain anonymous. Who gets to decide. Can you, anymore? Sensory overwhelm. Overloading info or removing it. How much info do you prefer? We all know too much. And nearly nothing at all. Visual disruption, oscillating in and out of focus to induce euphoria or an intangible sense of not quite knowing, confusion that allows access to something else. Get lost in the negative spaces, slow down. Jump in. See where you find yourself. Where on the scale of abstract-figuration do you prefer? Where are you comfortable?
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a London-based artist working predominantly in oil painting, exploring the boundary between reality and the suspension of disbelief – and inviting viewers to step over that line. My current work uses snow as a motif to transport viewers into sensuous, altered states of consciousness, between worlds and composite times, slipping between figuration and abstraction.
Each painting evolves through a complex process of around 30 stages over several months, reflecting accumulative Bergsonian time and memories unfolding like Russian dolls, operating as consciousness might. My practice involves diverse techniques: I throw, smear, crush, sand, scumble and monoprint paint, often abandoning tools to work directly with my hands. This physical, intuitive engagement enables capturing fleeting sensations. I frequently paint through the night in a hypnopompic state that echoes the dreamlike worlds my work inhabits.
Sometimes I add ‘unpainting’ – bleaching, scraping, whitewashing, covering areas, or imply information never there. I invert spatial forms, perhaps only painting negative spaces, exploring beyond direct perception, the in-between. I seek empathetic texture where paint becomes its subject: white paint becomes ‘real’ snow; crushed pigment mimics snow’s chalky texture, then are raked to further ‘become’ it, it’s no longer paint but evokes deeply immersive sensations of the experience of snow.
Paintings transform into an investigation of materiality, emphasising painting as both object and experience beyond representation. I favour elusive materials and motifs (that can morph states or be both transparent and reflect, like water) and mix my own colours - ‘blacks’ are, in fact, fir green, inky indigo, rich plum; ‘whites’ are ice blues, lemon yellows and creams - challenging perception and inviting slower, deeper engagement.
Influenced by colour theorists, psychological states, the biology and psychology of vision, and artists who explore these themes, like Bonnard, I aim to evoke physical responses —a shiver seeing a painted icy mountain— through the paint’s directional movement, viscosity, tone, hue, and 3D impasto casting real, not just painted, shadows that push perception.
Snowscenes evoke the awe of nature, something bigger than ourselves, alongside the saudade of my 90s German childhood, playgrounds free from contemporary pressures—fast-paced lifestyles, attention economy, adult responsibility, pervasive technology and surveillance. Vast canvases create immersive viewing and tiny ones create an intimacy requiring close looking, both offering different doors to more easily glimpse somewhere ‘other’, places for escapism and vital respite, for reflection and connection to nature and memory. By constructing worlds that simultaneously exist and are invented, I question what is real and if we might better choose our own reality.
UPCOMING
MA Fine Art Graduation Show, City & Guilds of London Art School, Kennington, 7th-12th September, 2026
PV 7th September; open to the public 8th-12th September. Please email to arrange to view my work with me in person if you would like
STUDIO NEWS
This month has been spent preparing a four-metre snowscape to be shipped to Zurich and creating work to be exhibited in London this summer, developing spring research and photographs from trips into paintings. This month’s selection explores ever more abstract land/snow/ravescapes, as well as experiences and sensations captured from Berlin, Puglia and Devon. The theories of Rauschenberg and Ryman are becoming increasingly important. The subject of my work is really painting; what painting can do, impart and induce, not what the painting depicts.
I will shortly be launching a substack exploring contemporary and art historical concepts that I'm exploring through my work, if you would like to register to receive these please email. The first article will feature Josef Albers, Ryman, Rauschenberg, Basquiat, Lee Ufan, Rachel Whiteread, Rose Wylie, Cornelia Parker, Winifred Nicholson and Andrew Cranston, looking into the use of negative space, and its associated technical, material and theoretical nuances.
EDUCATION
2024-2026 MA Fine Art, City & Guilds of London Art School
2023-2024 Art Digger Lab, Madrid, Spain, trained under Jennifer Pochinski (Bay Area Figurative Movement, California, who trained under Pia Stern, who trained under Elmer Bischoff) and Ruprecht von Kaufmann (Berlin, Germany)
2020-2022 St Ives School of Painting, trained under Camberwell painter Alice Mumford (who trained under Sargy Mann and Euan Uglow; Uglow trained under Frank Auerbach)
2015 Royal Drawing School, London
2014 London Fine Art Studios, atelier training sight-size old masters techniques
2004-2008 MA Art History, University of St Andrews, first class distinction dissertation into oil painting restoration techniques
2003 British Institute, Florence, Italy
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
March 2026, City & Guilds MA Interim Show, London
June 2025, How the Light Gets In, Marylebone Gallery, W1G London
May 2025, Transmission, 27th floor Millbank Tower, London
April 2025, Works on Paper, Marylebone Gallery, W1G London
April 2025, Stackt, Toronto, Canada
March 2025, City & Guilds MA Interim Show, London
RESIDENCIES
Oct 2024-May 2025, Transmission - in collaboration with UAL Camberwell, London and OCADU, Toronto, Canada
Heron’s work is in private collections in the UK and Europe and she is internationally exhibited with recent public and gallery shows in London and Toronto.
Heron is a painting and print tutor for the National Saturday Club and Tutors into Schools Program with City & Guilds of London Art School.
Heron lives and works in London.