My paintings are stories. They are stories about both the process of painting and about subjects of the paintings. Considered individually, they are separate fragments, but joined together they become series whose elements dovetail in a temporal or thematic continuum.
A recurring theme in my paintings is a woman who is constantly changing her form.
She is like the main character in a play, the script of which she has misplaced. She changes roles along with the scenery, yet she is always feeling a bit lost and off-course. Sometimes she goes for a reckless walk in a park at night, other times she dwells in gloomy hotel rooms, sunk in apathy. Although she is almost always alone, it is as if she were performing to an unknown audience, waiting for something to happen, become, begin.
Shoes, skirts and other garments are very important for her, and she actually seems to use them as a foundation for constructing her otherwise volatile identity. In one picture she appears as a woman, in another she has become a young girl, yet however innocent she might seem, she never loses her awareness of her female gender and sexuality.
It is uncertain even to me who she ultimately is, although she has her origins in photographs I took of myself in staged situations that were based on my fantasies or fears. The woman is therefore not a self-portrait, she is a fantasy, a construction whose coherence or collapse in any given situation depends on the process of painting; will she cohere within her own outlines, retaining her illusory figure, or will she disperse into colours and brush strokes spreading all over the canvas – as if collapsing under the weight of her own material.
Tiina Heiska
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