About

Elisabeth Heying is a painter, material researcher and educator. She is inspired by the poetry of matter, especially the kinship between painting materials, minerals found in the earth, and construction materials used to build the world we inhabit. In her work, the layers of the earth and the layers of a painting share much conceptual ground: they function as evidence of time and a record of action on a surface.

 Heying uses traditional mediums such as oil and egg tempera, as well as contemporary mediums like acrylic, to create pictorial space and emulate textured surfaces. Readymade materials including gardening perlite, sand and found minerals stand alongside painted passages to represent themselves within the picture plane. This varied material usage engages ideas of perception and material meaning. At the heart of her work is a question of connection. What is the connection between people and place? Between place and material? Between material and our shared human history? Between construction and erosion, creation and formation, time and entropy? Heying’s paintings offer viewers the opportunity to examine our fleeting reality in tangible form and to open their eyes to meaning embedded in place.

Heying earned a BFA (2015) in Studio Arts and an MFA (2022) in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was the founding director of a state of the art facility called StudioLab, where she educated SAIC students on how to make and use traditional and modern painting and drawing materials between 2016 and 2022. In this role, she developed educational resource collections including a Library, a Material Archive of historic pigments and materials and a Virtual Database of instructional videos.

 In 2022, Heying left Chicago and spent over two years traveling across three continents creating place-based artwork and archives. From 2022-23 she lived in between mountain ranges in Santiago, Chile archiving earth pigments and observing the connections between geological and painting processes. Heying earned a Fulbright Award for Art and Research and spent 2023-24 in Nicosia, Cyprus creating a pigment archive and exploring the revered archaeological sites and abandoned mines on the island through her painting practice. She completed an artist residency in Orkney, Scotland with the Museum of Loss and Renewal in 2024. Solo exhibitions include Fragments & Throughlines (2024) at CYENS Thinker Maker Space in Nicosia, Cyprus; Preposiciones de Tierra (2023) in Casa Vacuña in Santiago, Chile; Shifting Matters (2022) at FMAAA Art Center in Fort Madison, IA; and Ache of Erosion (2021) at SITE 280 Gallery in Chicago, IL. She was a Golden Artist Educator from 2017-2023, received the Roads Scholarship for Research and Travel in 2020, and serves as a board member of Pigments Revealed International.

Heying currently lives and works in Minneapolis creating artwork, selling handmade art materials, and teaching pigment and paint making workshops in her studio.

CONTACT

elisabeth.heying@gmail.com

ALL artwork is available for purchase, unless indicated as SOLD. Small works and works on paper are available for direct purchase on my SALE page.

‘Please contact me directly for prices, inquiries, comments, studio visits, exhibitions, etc.!