2008 Woodie Awards
Turning doom into bloom
An art professor rebuilds with unique installments following Katrina experiences
Alison Peters
Issue date: 1/25/08 Section: Features
 While eye catching and vivid, Sally Heller's Web site photos only show a few sides of her work-it is in seeing her 3-D installations that the full essence of her creations can be felt.
"I strive to make my art visually engaging," Heller said. "I'm too ADD for traditional art at the moment. I want to entertain people and give them a lot to look at and I want people to come back to the exhibit again and again-my art is not a one time look."Â
Heller's exhibition, Bloom 'n Doom, is an installment created for the Miami Art Museum, which opened Thursday, Jan. 24, with an artist's talk at 7 p.m., and continues through May 10.
Heller's story is as interesting as her work.
Although she has painted movie sets, given lectures and been curator for multiple exhibitions, her inspiration is partially drawn from her experience during Hurricane Katrina, which devastated her hometown of New Orleans in 2004.
"When you experience a catastrophe it does, I think, change you," Heller said. "It encourages one to have fewer boundaries because something major could happen at anytime. I think the randomness has affected the way I work."
The tragedy inspired one of her famous exhibitions, Calamitrees, where she gathered pipe cleaners, broken plastic, PVC pipes, wires, old chairs and plastic orange webbing to create a display of whimsical trees.
"I use a lot of low-end manufactured goods-which I call human detritus-that lives in our drawers and adds to the clutter of our lives," Heller said. "I've been doing these installations using trees as metaphors to show how much we as a culture consume."
It was driving down the street that the inspiration for the tree installments came to Heller.
"I saw these trees on the neutral ground that had taught wires around them that looked very pathetic, but also very moving to me," she said. "So, for my next installation I decided to make these tall cylindrical shapes that had branches coming off of them, and I found the more I mimicked nature, the more compassion people gave my work."
"I strive to make my art visually engaging," Heller said. "I'm too ADD for traditional art at the moment. I want to entertain people and give them a lot to look at and I want people to come back to the exhibit again and again-my art is not a one time look."Â
Heller's exhibition, Bloom 'n Doom, is an installment created for the Miami Art Museum, which opened Thursday, Jan. 24, with an artist's talk at 7 p.m., and continues through May 10.
Heller's story is as interesting as her work.
Although she has painted movie sets, given lectures and been curator for multiple exhibitions, her inspiration is partially drawn from her experience during Hurricane Katrina, which devastated her hometown of New Orleans in 2004.
"When you experience a catastrophe it does, I think, change you," Heller said. "It encourages one to have fewer boundaries because something major could happen at anytime. I think the randomness has affected the way I work."
The tragedy inspired one of her famous exhibitions, Calamitrees, where she gathered pipe cleaners, broken plastic, PVC pipes, wires, old chairs and plastic orange webbing to create a display of whimsical trees.
"I use a lot of low-end manufactured goods-which I call human detritus-that lives in our drawers and adds to the clutter of our lives," Heller said. "I've been doing these installations using trees as metaphors to show how much we as a culture consume."
It was driving down the street that the inspiration for the tree installments came to Heller.
"I saw these trees on the neutral ground that had taught wires around them that looked very pathetic, but also very moving to me," she said. "So, for my next installation I decided to make these tall cylindrical shapes that had branches coming off of them, and I found the more I mimicked nature, the more compassion people gave my work."
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