Preserving the Passage of Time with Heidi Norton

by Taylor Moore

Heidi Norton’s (MFA 2002) childhood was anything but normal.

Growing up in the ‘80s on a homestead in West Virginia, her family of four harvested their own vegetables, swam in a quarry that used to be a limestone mine, and cooked meals using a wood cookstove in a log cabin built from scratch, with no electricity available until years later. Her parents were “back-to-land” homesteaders who decided to buy a plot of earth from the classified section of Mother Earth News magazine. This decision came to define Norton’s sense of her place in the world.

Norton’s earliest memories are of living deep in the woods. In 1973 her parents left Baltimore—“disenchanted by the Vietnam War” and fearful of nuclear power—to homestead on a remote West Virginia property. There they built their own shelter by hand, cooking over open wood fires and using a solar oven to bake bread. “We didn't have toys,” Norton said. For fun, she and her sister would play make-believe, collect flowers, and make mud pies. “It was a primitive kind of life, and that simplicity really emphasized the natural world around us. What [my parents] wanted us to understand was that … protecting and preserving and giving back to the natural world was where you found happiness and joy.”

When Norton’s family moved to a small Maryland town when she was 12, she felt a strong sense of loss for “a place where time stood still.”

Norton, now an artist, founder of Vantage Points, and professor at the International Center of Photography in New York City, has returned to these questions over and over again in her work—how to preserve the natural world and how to capture the passage of time. Her multimedia works, which frequently blur the lines between sculpture, painting, and photography, look like “enlarged microscopic slides—something that might be pulled out of a natural history museum,” she said. Bright colors ooze into each other in compositions incorporating found objects and both living and preserved plants. 

“I've always been interested in how different media registers time or space, and how it organizes our sense of space.”

After graduating high school, she went on to pursue photography at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for her undergraduate degree. She became interested in fine arts photography and decided to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her master of fine arts, under the mentorship of the late Barbara DeGenevieve. There, her artistic scope broadened. “At that time, photography was in this place of really digging hard into conceptual photography based in formalism, like Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall. That led to wanting to broaden outside the medium,” she said. “Photography could only give me so much, and I wanted to expand outside of that, especially in regards to material and thinking about materiality. That’s how I got into sculpture.”

A turning point in her artistry was her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2012. Norton’s sculptures incorporated living plants and other found objects trapped in paint, glass, and resin, often using reclaimed glass from Liam Gillick vitrines from a prior exhibition.

“I really was into the idea that the glass became not just a plane to work on top of, but also a threshold,” she said. “You could look through it, you could look at the surface, you could see yourself reflected onto the surface, which then merged with the plant.  If the plant was dying or dead, it forced you to consider your relationship to that.”

She also included photographs of other deconstructed sculptures, effectively compressing 3D into 2D. “I’ve always been interested in how different media registers time or space, and how it organizes our sense of space.” 

Her later works have expanded on these ideas, incorporating colorful undulating photographic scrolls or producing images over multiple slides of glass. “With each step, with each angle, with each vantage point, as you move around the work, as you pull closer or push farther away, there is a new composition. It’s not even just a composition, it’s three dimensional. [It’s] constantly shifting your perception of what you’re looking at.”

In addition to her teaching and artistic practice, she is the founder of Vantage Points, an art education and mentoring organization based in New York City. Her offerings help students of all ages and levels develop their artistic practice and voice. They vary from technical courses, to career development, to theme-based classes.

Over the years, Vantage Points has become a collective for working artists. “Human connection is one of the most important things. That was emphasized through the pandemic, and I think where we are now with the political climate and technology, having that community is everything,” she said. “Not everybody knows where to go and where to find that.”

Norton has wrestled with many of the same ideas since childhood, but it has taken time—a lifetime—for those ideas to coalesce and develop. In homage to the places she visits, she often sources her materials from the surrounding area and builds site-responsive sculptures. Many items, such as horseshoe crabs and mermaid purses, were collected during the COVID-19 lockdown. Other materials are more personal, like plants taken from her mother’s garden. She’s even used flowers collected in her childhood field guide—leaves pressed into the pages decades earlier, as if collected only yesterday. Rather than freezing nature instantaneously, Norton’s process allows it to live (and slowly change) within the art piece. The cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth happening within each work echoes the very passage of time she seeks to preserve.

Today, Norton views art-making as an ongoing, evolving process. She believes that clarity about one’s creative path generally emerges through practice over years, not immediately after school. As Norton puts it, her career is “cyclical and sustainable”—built step by step through continuous making, breaking down, and remaking. She advises young artists not to expect instant answers, but to learn through experience. “Knowing where you want to be comes through a life of practicing and learning,” she said. ■