Valerie Hegarty, George Washington (detail), 2007, mixed media

Valerie Hegarty speaks of her works as living things undergoing change. For the past several years her process has involved copying and then modifying iconic American paintings, making them look as if they had been pummeled by waves, attacked by birds, or singed by fire. Recently, she has started taking this deterioration further, asking what might happen if these fragments of nature's destruction decomposed to such an extent that they actually began to regenerate. Instead of carefully pre-planning her works as she had done in the past, Hegarty now favors “sketching sculpturally,” allowing pieces to evolve through spontaneity and improvisation. This process lends remarkable dynamism to her recent sculptural paintings. Like shoots bursting from seeds, we catch these works in the midst of “changing and becoming and hopefully moving forward.” The momentum is contagious.


Miriam Katz: For a while you were making pieces that looked as if they had been destroyed by nature, as if nature had made the work more real, or more representative of the world as it actually is. Now it seems like you’re taking this a step further, so that the work is no longer simply destroyed by, say, a woodpecker or a storm, but is actually being transformed into something else entirely.

Valerie Hegarty: Yes, and now I’m trying to figure out what the transformation could be. That piece that you’re looking at now, Unearthed, is not simply a deteriorated painting. It’s almost as if it were planted in the ground and grew. I've been toying with making a landscape painting become a landscape itself. Is that somehow more accurate than simply painting a landscape? In the earlier work, I had taken paintings and sculptures from Art History and broken them down so that they looked as if they'd been through a natural disaster—so that there was even more historical information dumped on the historical painting.

Valerie Hegarty, Unearthed, 2007, mixed media

MK: So, it’s not just a depiction of something. The painting has actually gone through some kind of experience itself.

VH: t’s as if I’m asking if the painting is more factual now that it doesn’t just depict an experience, but instead, actually goes through an experience. Last year I began copying iconic Abstract Expressionist paintings, like a Clyfford Still or a Mark Rothko, and I made them look as if they’d been through a fire. People often found them funny because AbEx paintings are already so laden with historical significance and imposed meaning, and my works made that even more explicit, as if they had actually gone through events themselves.

MK: There’s also the psychological component—AbEx paintings are supposed to set the viewer aflame with their emotive power, and here they are literally being set on fire. There’s this notion of Rothko and Still...

VH: ...Igniting all these ideas.

Valerie Hegarty, Rothko Sunset, 2007, mixed media

MK: And that looking at them provides us with this ultimate experience of the sublime.

VH: Exactly. A natural disaster is itself a sublime event. I’ve been working a lot with sublime landscapes. I recreated an Albert Bierstadt masterpiece, Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868), a sublime mountain scene, and I made it look as if it had been attacked by a woodpecker. In that work, it was as if nature had rearranged or tweaked the painting to be a more accurate reflection of the current situation in the world, whereas the original painting was a more idealized version. But going back to Unearthed, I wanted it to look like something believable, but actually be impossible.

MK: That seems to be a departure from your earlier work because the pieces that you made before this were always possible.

VH: Exactly. They were perhaps improbable—it’s unlikely that something disastrous could happen to a master painting—but they were still possible, and now I’m interested in pushing the works into the realm of the impossible while still having them be somewhat convincing.

MK: And that adds layers to the experience of seeing the work. When I first saw Unearthed, I didn’t immediately think that it was impossible. The colors are accurate, and everything kind of makes sense. But then I started to see that the frame is not just tangled into the branches, but the frame is actually becoming the branches. It’s a subtle impossibility.

VH: Right. It’s as if a painting were stuck in the ground, growing roots, and it makes the viewer ask if the painting grew roots or if the roots grew a painting. I like that idea of a painting sprouting from nature, along the lines of early American landscape painting, when artists tried to show that God was present in the spiritually-imbued American landscape, as opposed to European ruin. There was this implication that paintings were naturally born out of that space. So I started thinking about how a painting can literally be born out of nature.

Valerie Hegarty, Bierstadt (Among the Sierra Nevada) with Holes, 2007, mixed media

MK: I understand that you’re interested in overturning notions of painting as a sublime experience, and notions of the grand and mighty American landscape as represented in painting, but it seems like you’re not just simply being critical. Can you say something about the level of sincerity or hope in your thinking and in your work?

VH: I’m being ironic but also earnest at the same time. For me this is where the notion of transformation comes in because things have to break down before they grow again. I’ve been in a stage of breaking things down for a while now, but I’m hitting a point at which I want the work to transform or be reborn in a different way. I’m also thinking about what remains resilient even after the work has gone through the experience of a disaster. If you think about that literally in reference to Unearthed, there’s still a little piece of the frame. But now the frame has become much more complicated and three-dimensional. There are all these corners and turns in it now. It’s more complex and also more organic. This relates to the repressed elements in the history of art. Nineteenth-century landscape paintings often depicted pastoral scenes, but what about the darker, hidden elements of history and landscape, the things that weren’t often depicted, like the swamp? I think about all of the stuff that has been repressed re-emerging or transforming.

MK: Meaning that if we repress the fact that the swamp exists, the swamp is going to come back with a vengeance—or in the case of your works, the flood, the fire, or the woodpecker.

VH: Yes, and I don’t want to depict the actual flood or whatever. I want to show what’s left behind—objects that look like they have been swept up and then dropped somewhere. You have to make sense of that like an archaeologist to determine where this object came from and what happened to it.

Valerie Hegarty, Homer Was Swept Away (Northeaster), 2007, mixed media

MK:I know that in the case of the AbEx paintings, the burning was related to what was depicted in the paintings and the history surrounding that. In general, are the paintings that you copy and what you then do to them related?

VH: For a while, there was a very literal relation. The paintings of seascapes looked as if they had been swept up in a flood. The content had a direct connection to what I was doing to it. I've actually been trying to move away from that to work with my own abstraction. If you remove direct references to Art History, the piece becomes more contained within itself. I like the idea that the work is becoming more of its own thing.

MK: Maybe it’s brave to not have the reference.

VH: The reference is a strong thing to hang onto because the viewer can always fall back on that if everything else fails. When the reference is gone, people don’t have that thing to hold onto, so they are pushed farther.

MK: For sure. Encountering a new work for the first time can be overwhelming, especially when you see something that you can’t quite understand. There’s something reassuring about recognizing a Clyfford Still in your work that could be an anchor to the viewer.

VH: Or maybe the anchor isn’t the image anymore. We recognize the branch and frame in Unearthed. So there may be other ways to give the work an anchor. It will be interesting to see what comes out of all of this. I can’t really visualize what I want my work to look like right now. I’m used to pre-planning, but now I just have to start working, like I’m sketching sculpturally.

MK: It seems as if there’s something vital about the energy that you put into these works. Can you say something about why the making itself is so important?

VH: Making the work myself shows that I’m actually sincere. If this work were just about making fun of the history of painting, I could just get some paintings and stomp on them. But it’s not about that. I’m breaking these paintings after spending months making them and getting attached to them.

MK: Maybe part of the work is in destroying it and dealing with what it is to let go of it—similar to what it is to let go of work when you sell it.

VH: Yes, and also I work so intensely with my hands that I end up knowing every bend and twist in the pieces that I make—as if I’m absorbing them on a cellular level. So it feels especially strange to not be able to run my hands over them once they leave my studio.

MK: I’d like to get back to the notion of nature destroying something and what it means to take that further. Have you thought about what the destruction could possibly lead to or generate?

VH: I think that Unearthed is starting to answer that question, because it’s not just being destroyed, it’s changing. And yes, I’ve thought about the rebirth notion that you’re talking about. I’m actually interested in it in terms of seeds, as if the object or the painting could become seeds for another object or painting.

MK: It makes me think about some of your more all-over installations, in which discreet pieces all seem to be part of one larger piece that was perhaps torn apart and spread out throughout the space.

VH: Right, so all of the pieces sort of fit together, but they’re also each becoming their own entity, as if there were an explosion and all of the pieces and fragments became new things. And I’m wondering how to turn those ruins or remains into seeds or beginnings.

MK: So they’re still sort of breathing and moving.

VH:Yes. I think with Unearthed, there’s this aspect of frozen animation—catching something as it’s changing. The fragments are starting to transform but haven’t yet completely. It’s an exciting thing to experiment with—this pivotal moment when things are changing and becoming and hopefully moving forward.