Heidi Martin Kuster's work extends from an interest in memory, and the evidence of time's passage in the surface of stones. She uses oil, acrylic, and gouache paint, along with plastic, plaster, canvas and paper to make beautifully intricate works both large and small.
Heidi Martin Kuster was born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and spent her childhood in the rural midwest. Currently residing on The Outer Banks of North Carolina, she has lived and worked in New York City, Nashville, Chicago, Brussels, Barcelona, Paris, and Hatteras Island. She received her Master’s from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in private and public collections throughout Europe and The United States.
Heidi Martin Kuster’s paintings are abstractions of the impressions she finds in geological surfaces. She is interested in how time notates itself in stone, and the personal and universal implications of marked memories. Her compositions become intimately translated transitory moments.
She sometimes includes bits of plastic in her collages as a contemporary metaphor for human influence on Earth's current state of evolution. Kuster often employs the grid, bringing focus and categorization to what might otherwise seem to have been insignificant events. Her work is simultaneously playful and process oriented, always organic and intensely observant of line and form.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work is an examination of nature’s mark making and memory. I am particularly interested in the surface of rocks and the movement of water. My paintings acknowledge the interplay between earth’s physical notations and my human recollections. In this way I consider the inevitable merge between universal and personal history.