Laura Heit

Laura Heit created while an artist in residence at Leland Ironworks in Oregon City, Oregon – the land and studio of renowned Sculptor Lee Kelly. Having planted Douglas Firs on the land when he first arrived more than 70 years ago, he spent his career creating large-scale abstract steel sculptures as the trees grew up around him. All throughout the five acres, you will encounter his sculptures. Heit sketched his sculpture as they walked through the woods, and then began a daily practice of intuitive drawn animation. Each morning Heit would start with a sketch of his playful monuments and draw a sequence of images on notecards, each drawing informing the next, working in the manner of an improviser. Willing a movement from the drawn objects. The music was created by fellow Artist-in-Residence Daniel Charles Hunt a percussionist, who recorded compositions by playing the large steel sculptures with mallets and a variety of tools. In the track for this piece, you can hear Lee Kelly build a fire in the background. Thank you: Ford Foundation, Christina Conant, Lee Kelly.

About the Artist

A multimedia artist, Laura Heit’s work has been exhibited and screened in the US and abroad, at venues including Track 16 (Los Angeles, CA), Boise Art Museum (Boise ID), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), The Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland OR), She Works Flexible (Houston, TX), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), MoMA (NYC, NY), Millennium Film (NYC, NY), Pompidou (Paris, France), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), the Guggenheim Museum (NYC, NY), Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles, CA), and Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI) among others. Her grants include; 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship, Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, The British Council, and the Mac Dowell Colony. She has previously held positions at SAIC, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Cal Arts where she was co-director of the Experimental Animation Department. Her book Animators Sketchbooks was published in 2013 by Thames and Hudson. She currently lives and works in Portland Oregon.