Her Story

Heather Marie Scholl

I am a Brooklyn, NY based artist and activist.

At the intersection of art and activism, I experiment with the ways I can bring a productive emotionality to social justice topics. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we're born into fantasies of the way life should be and the ways that comes crashing down around us. For me, this entails connecting personal experiences with contemporary and historical systems of power. I explore the emotionality of these topics and some of the ways in which they are enacted using embroidery and mixed media.

My journey in attempting to understand my own trauma and oppression, while revealing my complicity in white supremacy, has fostered a desire to help other white women connect to their own dual experiences of oppression. Through this intimate approach to racism/white supremacy, sexuality, gender, and sexual trauma, I find that my work often triggers a personal, visceral response in viewers, which fosters an examination of the concepts it explores and ones own role in upholding systems of oppression.

The materiality of my pieces echo this intimate approach by always returning to the body and the home through the use of embroidery arts and garment- and home-decor pieces. Each of these mediums has been used almost exclusively by women for hundreds of years not merely for decorative purposes, but to document family, religious, regional and national stories. In particular, I find that I am drawn to the many ways in which figurative, surrealist, and religious art can intersect to tell stories about how we make sense of the world. Weaving together aesthetic inspiration from different eras, the pieces I create are removed from a single temporal context and instead become bearers of stories rooted in the past, present, and future.