Heidi Jackson

Landlocked: New works 2021

Landlocked, we dream of rivers.  Hard by a wild shore, we watch as the tide ebbs and flows.  Under skies that go on forever, the landscape is laid low.  In Heidi Jackson's stunning new work, images from the natural world invoke the stresses and upheavals of our times.  Inspired by places she knows by heart - the Manawatu and Pohangina Rivers in New Zealand, the western plains of New South Wales, and Seal Rocks on the mid-northern coast - abstract forms speak to inner qualms.  A palette drawn from earth ochers, white water, brackish lakes, and lowering cloud captures thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for words.  The light is crepuscular, the sun is seen through smoke, a river reaches the sea only to be blocked by a collapsing cloud, forbidding outcrops bar our way.   We are caught in a liminal zone, counting the hours before dawn or the days before a new departure.  We long, like the pooled watercourses, to break free of rocky dams and defiles.  But Heidi's vision is as lucid as her brushstrokes are fluent.  These paintings draw our eyes upward into endless skies, along rivers that still flow, through gaps in a rock wall, lifting our spirits, rediscovering the light.

Professor M D Jackson

Harvard Divinity School

2021

Cosmic Infrastructure: New works 2023

The works are sublime, full of mystery and promise. They seem to exist in a liminal space between the natural world, as we know it, and a kind of mythic, psychedelic plane. The questions they inspire are boundless…  Are they landscapes or ancestral planes? Literal locations, or expressions of energetic experience?  The other-worldly pinks and blues beguile, while the use of, an almost spectral monochrome simmers with tension. What a profound collection of contrary works, each in their different way managing to be both delicate and robust, stark and cluttered, magical and literal.  

Brita McVeigh

Wellington 2023