The Miami Art Blog by Heike Dempster

I love Miami's atmosphere. I feel like it's an intimate place for being a 'city' and I love its tropical temperature. I could be having a horrible day and I just have to go outside to feel better. I'll take a bike to the water and take in the salty air.

I have always been interested in art and drawing. I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I have memories of just scribbling on walls and in books. I would illustrate my life, my future. I would tell stories to my parents about wanting to be a doctor or about my future place. I actually started out drawing really realistically, like people and portraits. Then, in the beginning of college I started doing more abstract things. I would say people I have met influenced me, like when I started dating David (Marsh) whose work is very abstract; he opened me up to that world. I started taking art history classes and learning more about artists that I like, Julie Mehretu, local artists like Liza Sylvestre and I like Louis Bourgeois and the emotional aspect behind her work

As artists, we are total opposites. I find this advantageous because it's a constant conversation between us because of how easy it is to talk about what we like or don't like certain things. My fiancé was definitely influential in going into abstraction. He taught me that concepts and imagery don't always have to be obvious, that you free your mind more with it.

I am still developing my voice right now. The questions I am asking myself as I create these pieces are about femininity. My work looks very feminine. I am questioning what is feminine work and what does it mean to use floral patterns. It is a conversation I have with myself. When I started doodling and developing more I started questioning what is this imagery. I respond by looking to sewing and embroidery and questioning fashion.

I feel like my work is very obsessive. I am trying to break free right now and have looser drawings. It is very meditative. I find it very therapeutic. I though I would become a writer. I used to write a lot of stories and I feel like my drawings have the same kind of meditation as writing. I used to be very into poetry. My obsessive drawings can look cursive in a way and I feel like that is liberating. Now I find that I am trying to move forward even more by making it more abstract and have less distinct lines. I do not write anymore. My drawings are my outlet.

I have actually. I think in phrases and stories. I am very much still a writer in my mind yet, when I express myself, it comes out in drawings.

There is one drawing that I have that is very abstract. It has jellyfish in watercolor with very fine lines and I titled it “There is Something Deeper Lurking Underneath” and I had a drawing of a ball of thread and I called it ‘A Little Unraveling Could be Liberating.” A lot of my titles are lines from poems I imagine.

Naming is important to me as it is an integral part of each piece. Sometimes my drawings are born from phrases or thoughts in my head while other times titles are my own conscious response to a more unconsciously created drawing. Naming in itself is a conversation with myself about my pieces.

I am not sure. A lot of the titles that I have are emotions that I am trying to express and they are all related.

I love that. That is the beauty of art, have people see other things in your work. At the same time, when I look at my work it is so personal to me. I feel like I hide behind those images at the same time. A lot of times people look at my work and they say they are beautiful drawings. They are so flat and so detailed that people often do not know there was a feeling behind it. People look at art and think it is a way of looking into your emotions and thoughts. That is the interesting thing about abstraction and my work.

My drawings are an outlet when I am frustrated or when I feel like my thoughts are obsessive. The drawing is a release of that. The emotions can be positive and negative. My drawings are mental mappings, in a way. Some people describe them as mandalas but as soon as I start drawing I loose myself in the work. The embroidery especially is such a tedious process that I literally just loose myself in the work which is what I want to achieve. When I look at my work I see the personal conversations with myself and also isolated thoughts that I have had and yet people think they are beautiful. I can appreciate that. That in itself is enough for me.

Very recently. I use thread on paper. I wanted to figure out a way to make the drawings more tangible, more tactile. I started the sewing based on my questions on femininity which then opened up more ideas of fashion and also surface. How can I get underneath the surface. How can I get more personal about it? What I am trying to experiment with is trying to draw people in. The patterns are so interesting. You think it is a repeated pattern but it is hand drawn so there is that personal aspect to it. As I incorporate sewing and the patterns and I think about textiles it definitely opens up a different avenue for me as far as concepts. It makes me think of why people wear certain things and why girls cover themselves and how do people express themselves through fashion and what is underneath all of that. I am thinking of skin and surface. I started making different drawings of fur of different animals like the tiger. This is part of my current experimentation.

Me as a person, I definitely see myself as a right and left brain kind of person. People have said the drawings look scientific because they are so precise. It is a weird conflict because I feel like being so precise is keeping me from being personal. I do not try to replicate but I am interested in the process itself and when I am done and look at it I think “wow that really came together.”

I feel like I can go on forever. I have to force myself to stop or else I could drown in a drawing. Another artist I am looking to for inspiration is Yayoy Kusama. I do not want to achieve her aesthetic but I am interested in her process. She calls it “self-obliteration,” a process of loosing herself in a painting. It is not necessarily about her, it is about something bigger than herself. That is how I feel about my work. I am still trying to discover and develop my voice. I am hungry about fashion and textiles and patterns and embroidery. All of those things I want to incorporate in my work.

Very important. I try to play with different colors and contrasts. Right now, I really like black and reds.

I guess for me it is more about the emotional aspect. Reds are very strong and passionate and black is very bold. I feel like those are the best colors to express myself with at the moment. Even when writing, I love writing in black ink and red ink.

It is part of that meditative process. There is something therapeutic and spiritualistic about it. Your thoughts are a cycle.

That is interesting for an artist who is still developing her voice. My parents never really raised me in the culture so in a way I feel kind of culture-less. I feel kind of whitewashed. My drawings are cold in a way because they are so precise and that may be partly because I do not have a cultural backing and there is not a lot of imagery from my culture in them. I don’t see an influence from that. My drawings are like isolated systems to me, rituals of some sort.

Not right now. The last one was the “Solar Intuition” group show in Wynwood with David and Brandon Opalka. I am in a period of creating new things.