Bridgewater Artist Gets Inspiration From Mundane

She gets her inspiration from materials themselves, whether they be address labels, clothes tags or fabric—and now this Bridgewater artist is showing off close to 20 of her pieces at the South Orange Performing Arts Center [SOPAC].

Hollie Heller unveiled her exhibit, called “Transcendent Nature,” at the SOPAC May 12, and it will remain open through Sept. 3.

“I am very pleased, but it didn’t happen right away,” she said. “It’s a compilation of about 19 pieces of art that were made within the last five years.”

Heller said her work has very different themes, but they are all related to each other, despite being varied in terms of size and media she works with.

“It starts off with a collage technique, and then develops from there using unusual materials,” she said. “It is inspired by nature, and I think most of my work is inspired by that.”

“There’s also a strong relationship to ethnic designs, very inspired by primitive art and Indian motifs that you might see in textile designs,” she added.

In addition, Heller said, there’s a piece in her show called “Earth Matters”—it is 25 feet high, and starts at the bottom floor of the gallery and reaches to the third. She said the piece is made out of silk that she dyed and cut, and then used with acrylic mediums to create straw-like structures.

“Most of the work I do is time-consuming,” she said. “I do small manual work, and it's repetitive, so the piece has thousands of straw and colors gradating through it. It almost has an underwater feeling to it, with inspiration from landscape and other parts of the same.”

Heller said she gets her inspiration from materials she sees in flea markets, garage sales and other locations.

“I like items with history to them, things that are old, like old documents or letters,” she said.

One piece in the exhibit, Heller said, is made out of JC Penny tags that she colored, cut in half and layered onto a panel.

“I like the idea that someone could look at a piece and then it first looks like a colorful thing, but when you get closer you see it’s JC Penny tags,” she said. “It comes from a different world, and a lot of what I do with work is try to transform materials that way.”

“They might be everyday materials, but I try to use them as not for what they are normally used for, and create an art piece,” she added.

As for the show itself, Heller said she has a family friend who donated money when the SOPAC was being built to create the Herb and Millie Iris Gallery. Millie Iris, she said, is a very close friend who knows her work.

“She wanted me to have the opportunity to show my work,” Heller said. “She put my name in as an artist to show, and I’m the second artist having a show there.”

Heller said the SOPAC does not have a separate room for a gallery, so her pieces are hanging throughout the hallway near the theater and public movie theater.

“So there is a lot of public traffic coming through,” she said. “Where my art is hanging is not where the movie theater crowd would be, but there is no wall, so you can see where all the different pieces are.”

“It’s an unusual space in that way,” she added. “It is tricky to install because you don’t want heavy pieces in the traffic areas or where children might put fingerprints. It’s a public place.”

Heller said she has been an artist since she was at the University of Delaware, where she was an art education major. She also graduated with a masters in weaving and textile design from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“There are two pieces at the end of the show, and both of them have imagery that is a diagram of a knit design,” she said. “I’m very inspired by textiles and the fact that they are everyday items, but you are sometimes not aware of how they are made.”

Aside from her art itself—and other galleries she has held before—Heller said she teaches a collage class at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and used to teach textile design at William Patterson University.

But now, Heller said, her career is going to take a different turn.

After living in Bridgewater for almost 22 years, Heller said she is currently preparing to move to Costa Rica with her husband to open an art retreat. She said she is in the process of selling the house, although that probably won’t happen for at least another year.

“I have been going there, and I love the whole idea of living overseas,” she said. “I am constantly teaching, and I really love watching and participating and helping people make art. I learn a lot from it, and it’s inspirational to teach and watch how people make art.”

Heller said she sometimes flies to different locations to teach collage classes at colleges, art centers, studios and other locations.

“A lot of techniques I teach are my own, and I have experimented with them,” she said, adding that she works with advanced artists and those who have never taken a class before. “There are thousands of different ways to do collages.”

“I have been teaching for about 20 years,” she added. “We start off making decorative papers, do some photography. I love the idea of something being recognizable, but then you crop it and insert it into an art piece so it becomes part of the material. There is a lot of photography when I teach, with layering, lots of cutting and pasting.”

Heller said she pushes her students to think about things differently than they normally would.

“People are afraid to cut up a document, photograph or use a newspaper as art material rather than reading what the words are saying,” she said. “People have a hard time making a connection to think about not using something as what it is logically supposed to be used for. I try to come up with something unique and be really creative.”

Heller takes the the opportunity to both teach and work at home in her studio, creating her own art. She said she enjoys the social aspect of teaching and being with other people.

“I would not want to teach every day, then I would feel like I don’t have time in the studio,” she said. “But teaching gets you out of the studio, and when you’re working too much on your own, it can get isolating.”

Heller said she was not always as into art as she is now. She said she has three sisters, and her older sister was the very talented artist in the family.

“When I got to college, I didn’t want to follow everything she did even though I always loved art,” she said. “So I went to a big university, took a lot of classes and didn’t do well because I wasn’t interested. But every time I took an art class, I was getting really good grades.”

From there, Heller said, she always found time in her day for art, and always had space to work.

“I started doing collage because it was something I could start and stop, so when I was working and my kids woke up from a nap, I could just stop and three hours later go back to it," she said.

Heller said she has been working on pieces with labels now, where she takes address labels that were put through the computer, then she reproduces her photographs on the labels, peals them off and uses them in compositions.

“You can overlay them because they are transparent,” she said. “I like these little pieces, they are like mosaics.”

But now some of Heller’s focus is on her show, and she said she has found people are fascinated by it, and the time it takes to really understand the pieces.

“When I make art, it has to take a long time, or I don’t feel happy,” she said. “I like the labor and process of making art. I work in method that enables me to make compositions, but it takes time to make them because I enjoy the process.”

For more information, visit Heller’s website at hollieheller.com.

For more information about the gallery, visit the SOPAC website at SOPACnow.org.