Heller’s work might be characterised as ‘serious play’. Working in a wide range of media, including paintings and drawings on paper and fabric as well as sculptures in ceramic, plaster and glass, Heller embraces contradictory impulses. Her work evokes a series of dialectics: organic and geometric, inside and outside, ugly and beautiful, playful and
threatening, hard and soft. She is interested in the metaphoric implications of her seemingly abstract forms, which can be read as bodies, beings, architectural structures, enclosures or landscapes. Such readings lead us to reflect upon the conditions of existence, on instability and mutability,
and the environments we occupy. The molten glass form that sags under its own weight, the crystalline form that could be either a vast and extravagant architectural fantasy or a microscopic cellular form, the ink that bleeds across a seemingly impermeable border, are all metaphors for social structures and architectures and their relations to the human body.
Moreover, Heller’s choice of title for exhibition is suggestive. We inhabit a body but a landscape or architectural structure might also be an ‘habitat’
or ‘inhabitation’. In a further layering, the title might refer to something we do ‘in habit’, i.e. again and again, repetitively, over and over; a possible
reflection on the artist’s process.
Drawing is at the centre of Heller’s practice. In her images a world of fragile landscapes, associative traces and anthropomorphic hybrid creatures unfolds. Colour gradations in watercolour and ink develop into complex objects and forms, that oscillate between different scales. Heller develops her works on the basis of found visual material that she comes across in books, newspapers or the internet. What interests her is the formal construction of images. For example, the way in which from a birds’ eye
view a settlement is inscribed in the desert as though it were a drawing,
or a wall draws a line through a landscape, splitting it. She looks for
a principle or set of rules that define such constructs, and then explores them in her work.
The series ‘Zones’ (2021) comprises of more than twenty small reliefs. Heller
made negative moulds in clay, coloured plaster with ink and poured the material into delimited areas. She was thinking about the ways in which
people ‘intervene in territories, how they mark them out or demarcate
themselves.’ As in all Heller’s work, the ‘Zones’ deal with fundamental social themes such as ‘protection/shelter vs. repression/deconstruction, in relation to space and landscape.’
The potentially sinister-looking sculptural work, Untitled (2007–present), is composed of pompons made from black wool. The work is different every time it is presented as, firstly, it responds to the specifics of its new
home and, secondly, it is constantly growing as the artist adds to it. As a
result, the pompons take on a meaning very different to that of a comforting
ball of wool. Even if their appearance recalls a soft toy or creature, their proliferation is more suggestive of mushrooms, mould, spreading viral cells
or a colony of tiny living beings who bunch together in hordes around, for example, a source of heat.
Heller’s new glass sculptures, entitled ’Receptors’ (2023), embody her approach.
‘The ‘Receptors’ (2023) refer to internal processes of the (human) body which we hardly pay attention to in everyday life. They are
based on considerations of sensory perception. In their form, the objects are reminiscent of sensory buds or receptor cells
that have one or more openings/holes through which the outside communicates with the inside and vice versa. We explicitly expose ourselves to intensified sensory perceptions when we visit an exhibition, for example. At the moment when the ‘receptors’ are looked at, we receive inner and outer impulses, which in turn are
able to trigger emotions, thoughts, memories…’
Moreover, the material process of their making is important: ‘Becoming aware of one›s sense buds at this moment, results in
a kind of snapshot of this train of thought. The glass also hardens in a kind of snapshot of hot state organic tension as it cools.’

Photos © Parafin, London, 2023