Biography
Heidi Mortensen works across sculpture and installation to investigate displacement, loss, connection, and memory. Drawing from personal history and often incorporating artifacts salvaged from a fire that destroyed her family's house, her work examines the precariousness of the places we call home and delves into our reliance on the mutable realm of remembering.
Mortensen received an MFA in Sculpture Dimensional Studies from Alfred University, New York, and a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Hawaiʻi. Between degrees, she pursued atelier training in figure sculpting at the Barcelona Academy of Art.
In 2025 she presented a solo exhibition at Urban Glass Window Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and Le Mieux Galleries (New Orleans, LA). She was awarded first place at Slice, A Juried Cross-Section of Regional Art byPence Gallery (Davis CA). In 2024, Mortensen received a fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris, France, and she has been selected as the 2026 Sculptor-In-Residence for Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, (NH). Mortensen currently lives and works in New Orleans, LA.
Artist Statement
Through sculpture and installation work I explore the interplay between place and memory, investigating how our connections to specific sites, whether a house, a community, or the natural landscape, shape our sense of belonging and identity.
Fire destroyed my family home, leaving only burnt remnants and scattered recollections. This erasure of a place central to my personal and familial history initiated inquiries into our emotional and psychological attachment to place, and how loss situates us within the mutable and fragmentary realm of memory. While my practice is rooted in personal history, the work has evolved to address collective experiences of displacement from and connection to the places that define us.
Using the body, nature, and the home as central elements of inquiry, I delve into how the places of our lives are embedded in us. I am interested in the porous boundary between ourselves and our environment, the way it leaves traces within us while also absorbing our memories and stories.This intertwining of our identity with the precarious structures of home and the natural world feels all the more poignant as we contemplate a sense of place's temporality.
My mixed-media work often combines enduring materials such as metal, ceramic, concrete, or resin, with fragile and ephemeral materials such as thread, fabric, or glass. This contrast highlights the desire to make permanent that which is temporal, fleeting, or precarious. Thread, with its associations with mending, weaving, and connecting, has become a recurring element in my work as a metaphor for the ties that bind us to one another and to the places we inhabit.
Through sculptural installations and carefully chosen materials, I create work that invites contemplation of both intimate and universal experiences: our fundamental human need for connection, our relationship to the environments that shape us, and the importance of the places we call home.
