Heather Lyon is an artist with a deep connection to the place we now call the Blue Hill peninsula. She was born on a farm in Blue Hill, Maine to parents involved in the back-to-the-land movement that was inspired by the work of Helen and Scott Nearing. In 2009, she returned to the land that her parents farmed, and built a small off-the-grid solar timber frame using natural building techniques. As a teenager, she worked for the homesteader Stanley Joseph, neighbor of the Nearings, who lived in the Nearings’ first homestead in Harborside. Stanley taught her to make dried flower wreaths with flowers from his garden.

Heather has spent time on this piece of land over the years, and is thrilled to create a participatory living sculpture in collaboration with this place. Her work PORTAL (good life) will be installed in the garden made from plants from the site. She and her partner Ken Hoffmann will weave willow planted by Stanley and goldenrod from the Nearings’ land into a large circular form under the canopy of an apple tree. Visitors are invited to pass through the portal with curiosity and intention. This sculpture is the most recent piece in a series of portals that Heather has made across Maine, including at the University of Southern Maine’s Crewe Center for the Arts, The Parsonage Gallery, and Bates College.

Heather’s art practice is a visual and movement-based inquiry into the sublime. She uses site-responsive performance, video, and installation to investigate the interweaving of relationships through gestures of coded communication and embodiment practices. She is a lifelong student of transcendental meditation and nature-based mystical traditions. She holds both a BFA and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected exhibitions and performances include deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; SPACE Gallery, Portland, ME; IMRC Center, University of Maine Orono; College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, ME; Art in Odd Places, New York; Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal; “The Picnic Pavilion” Venice, Italy; The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and Lichtenberg Studios in der Museums-Lounge, Berlin, Germany. She has received grants from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Kindling Fund (Andy Warhol Foundation regranting program distributed by SPACE Gallery).

You can find more of her work on her website www.heather-lyon.com or Instagram @_heatherlyon