About Heidi
Heidi Shedlock is a South African, Durban based artist and educator who paints from her studio in Durban North. She was born in 1974 and grew up in a very creative family of talented crafters and makers. She spent many years involved in education before deciding to give up full time teaching and put all her energy and focus back into producing her own work.
Postcard paintings
Daily paintings ...
In 2013, after participating in numerous group exhibitions, she began a daily painting project called Paintings in the post. She produced 568 consecutive days of little postcard size studies and this resulted in a solo exhibition called ‘365 days of paint’. Paintings from this collection have travelled all over the world to private and corporate collections. She continues to do the occasional little small study as she feels these keep her artist eye trained and her skills of observation focused, both critical skills to the artist.
Recent work
The floral series ...
Her most recent floral series deals with flowers in a painterly, serendipitous style, where the essence of the flowers and the emotions they evoke are given preference to mere replication. For this reason she rarely paints the vase, vessel or container that holds the blooms. The interest is in the mark making, the emotions and the viewer’s reaction to the blooms.
Why flowers?
Why flowers you may ask? Flowers were a repeated theme throughout the postcard painting series. Their significance in our daily lives is immeasurable, as expressions of emotions that are often too complicated to express in words. We use flowers to celebrate life, death, marriage, birth, apology and appreciation. We use them to celebrate the somber and the joyful and have adapted them into something decorative, an ode to beauty. The semiotics of flowers can be traced through to ancient times. The simple bloom has become a metaphor for the abstract and a symbol of reproduction, birth, life, death, decay and rebirth. Flowers are a celebration of life and a way of expressing our most vulnerable reactions to it. Through flowers we can express that which we find hard or complicated to say.