BROOD FILM FEST 2016 OFFICIAL SELECTION:
Lu Heintz (USA, Rhode Island)
Learning To Letter, Tandem, Lead/Follow (2014)
Three Short Films
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“My work is personal, but it is not necessarily about me. The personal is a conceptual realm I investigate through everyday materials, experiences and exchanges. Personhood is a position tensioned between constructed expectations and individual agency, a juncture bonded by language. I make conceptually driven work examining, translating and remaking this language in sensorial, textual and material terms. My practice is transdisciplinary, finding many points of entry – textiles, metalsmithing, sculpture, video, sound, installation, performance, paper works, and writing – with a dedicated tendency towards the confluence of technique and meaning. The techniques become language, and while the materials may be common, so remains the gravity of my everyday questions around power, gender, labor, consumerism, intimacy, communication, and silence.
Recently my work has been influenced by my transition into motherhood, the experience having opened up powerful shifts in intention, form and methodology. Becoming a mother intensified how I position between the biological and the cultural, and inspired greater inquiry into embodied experience in discursive spaces. My everyday preoccupations with matters of reproduction, family and childrearing have compelled me to analyse how gendered meanings are socially produced in the family, the workplace, and in language.
The terrain of my work is always expanding but develops from a commitment to feminist thought. Some of it is informed by daily experiences of maintaining a home and family, and is created through time-intensive processes that reference domestic and economic conditions of women’s work. I see the identity of artist-mother as an important perspective from which to analyze historical expectations of female labour and art historical representations of mothers, mothering and childhood.”
Lu Heintz holds a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and is MFA candidate in Visual Art at Vermont College of Arts.