HEATHER STEWART

Heather Stewart lives in the Surf Coast Shire in the tiny township of Moriac. 
Stewart has made artwork continuously for 40 years while dedicating considerable energy and time to learning and teaching. The history of art and a love of beauty have been constants throughout her life.  In 1994 she gained the first PhD in Australia in visual arts research at Deakin University and this enabled her to co-found Brougham Art School and Gallery in Geelong where she and her colleague Shirley Hurley were able to develop a program of art teaching based on a unification of history, theory and practice. 
These days a multidisciplinary practice including painting, sculpture, collage and drawing dominates her daily existence. 

While ranging over a variety of subjects including landscape, still life and the human form, and often juxtaposing nostalgic and contemporary imagery, Stewart sets up a dialogue questioning just what it is the viewer sees and understands; both reflecting on the past while developing new language structures and contemporary types of information.  She explores how in congruent, anachronistic images, multiple perspectives, materials and forms, even the remnants of established iconographies, can modify our view of what is normal.

This question of how we “renormitivise” our world-view pervades her multidisciplinary practice.
The visual language she develops moves inexorably towards diversity and disparity whilst seeking a new aesthetic.