Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature

During the curator/artist walkthrough of his recent major retrospective at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Culture and Nature, curator Rachel Gotlieb asked Steven Heinemann about the exhibition’s title: “Do you find culture and nature to be binaries, polarities, or is there something of a tension between the two?” he responded by stating the obvious (that nonetheless often goes unnoticed), that “there’s a unity that is organic with clay and ceramics; the materials automatically drive the process.” In my recent interview with Heinemann, he expanded on the logic of clay as the basis for his process and how, as a medium, it captures and refers to both the worlds of nature and of culture: “Clay does things constantly that reflect its organic nature, and it behaves in ways that we don’t necessarily determine or control. To me that’s just like a microcosm of nature operating in your hands or your studio.” He went on to further explain his views on the dynamics of culture and nature:

All the things that you bring [the medium of clay] as a human being—your interest in order and ways of organizing things; the workings of your brain and of the human mind brought to bear on this practice —