Heather Gentleman’s work is narrative in nature, finding inspiration in literature, history, and mythology. Her primary focus is drawing and painting, but also integrates sculpture, video, animation, text, and installation to create a cross pollination across genres. She chooses to layer media when it enhances the telling of the story by allowing the viewer a fuller comprehension of the layers of meaning  in the work. Imbued with psychological undertones and observation of contemporary culture in a historical context, she explores how ideas, themes and social mores recur and are paralleled from one time period to another and how our understanding of the past, and the future, is shaped by our own contemporary viewpoint.

Characters face the viewer as strangers that belong to a separate, surreal world, telling stories with the sensibility of an intimate conversation, expressing universal motifs that bridge with the personal.  Her large scale paintings, by sheer scale, are installations in themselves, engaging the viewer to step into the experience. Their totem like structures  have a theatrical feel that embody the physical and deal with the conscious and unconscious, the past and present, and space and memory.