Colleen Heslin is a Canadian mixed-media artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Heslin works predominantly with textiles and quilting to create an abstract compositions.
As a young artist Heslin established The Crying Room, a rented retail unit on Cordova Street and Main Street in Vancouver which she used as an exhibition space of other local artists' works. Her artist-run space became a venue for many new and emerging artists and placed an emphasis on equal exposure for female and male artists. A large focus on community can also be seen at Heslin's Crying Room in "The Writing on the Wall" project, which was a twenty-two-week public art project in 2011 exhibited outside the front of the gallery, as well as the "Chalkboard" project in 2003, also in front of the gallery. Under the gallery's operations Heslin facilitated several interviews with the exhibited artists on topics such as their inspiration, media, and style. Heslin also completed several residencies in North America and Europe including in Saskatchewan, Vevey, Berlin, Malcolm Island, and Joshua Tree between the years 2011-2016. She is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.
RBC Canadian Painting Contest
On October 2, 2013 Heslin was announced as the winner of the 15th Annual Royal Bank of Canada's Canadian Painting Competition for her painting titled Almost Young and Wild and Free. The winning painting incorporated several large swaths of fabric in bright hues of blue, gold and magenta and has a tromp l'oeil three-dimensional effect. She was praised for her "fresh approach to a traditional medium" with her usage of textiles and craft work. For her first-place finish, Heslin received $25 000 and her piece was added to RBC's private art collection. Runners-up in the competition were Colin Muir Doward and Neil Harrison.
Style and works
Heslin's textile series of paintings uses hand-dyed, previously owned domestic fabrics which are hung to dry in bunches which result in a three-dimensional tromp-l'oeil effect on the fabrics. Heslin sews abstract fabric shapes together in a process similar to quilting and then stretches the "abstract collage of cottons and linens" together around a frame. She developed this style around 2010 when she started to keep off-cuts of paintings for studies for future works. In her painting, Chain of Command, the washed-out grey panels suspend eight colourful, abstract shapes that have no obvious pattern or rhythm. The colourful, almost geometric, shapes do not directly border one another and they spread out to fill the entirety of the frame. Her paintings vary in their colour palette but seem to either be dominated by a greyscale palette or a blend of rich colours. The titles of her works "reflect a gesture within the work" and suggest a "landscapes of figures." The result has been compared to modernist abstract expressionist paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, specifically with the Colour Field painters.
Influences
Heslin has previously stated she drew inspiration from artists such as Sonia Delaunay. There are many similarities between Delaunay's 1911 patchwork quilt and Heslin's paintings in the brightly coloured bits of fabric sewn together. Art critics have compared Heslin's style to other modernist artists, and identified similarities to Jack Bush, Dan Christensen, William Perehudoff, and Helen Frankenthaler for their use of large abstract shapes in bright colours.
Critical reception
Heslin's use of traditional craft work in her textiles and needlework is often linked to discussions on feminism in labour and art, an element explored by several second wave feminist artists like Judy Chicago in ‘’Dinner Party’’. Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper compares Heslin's works to Matisse's paper cutouts and to Ludwig Sander's oil panels and describes her work as "the domestication or 'feminization' of the Colour Field machismo." Heslin's use of secondhand materials has been viewed as a comment on consumer excess.
Select exhibitions
Avant que je ne change d'avis, with Les Ramsay, RATS Collective, Vevey, Switzerland
Slow Down, Get Lost, with Les Ramsay, Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin Germany
