About the Artist

Heather TimmHeather Timm's work blurs boundaries between material and digital realities. She might paint with an image, animate a painting, or build a sculpture that only exists in virtual reality. She approaches each new idea as an open field of potential rather than a fixed outcome. She calls this practice "quantum kinship" — a belief, drawn from both ancestral knowledge systems and quantum physics, that nothing exists in isolation. Every artwork is a momentary collapse of infinite, interconnected possibilities.

Heather Timm TechnopunkBased in Seattle, Heather's work has been exhibited at the United Nations Summit of the Future, UN Sustainable Development Goals Awards in Rome, Grand Palais Éphémère Paris, Scope Art Show Miami, Lume Studios NYC, MaMa Multimedia Institute Zagreb, University of Chicago Media Arts, Data, and Design Center, and numerous galleries and street art locations. She is the recipient of dotART's 2025 International Artists Day Grand Prize. Her circuit-bent photography was selected by National Geographic award-winning photographers John Knopf and Michael Yamashita for inclusion in a coffee table book highlighting 100 exceptional photographers shaping the future of art and creativity.

Artist Statement

We live in a time that wants you to be one knowable thing: measurable, predictable, categorizable. Surveillance, algorithms, and systems of control depend on it. My practice rejects that and stays stubbornly open instead.

I work across painting, photography, video, glitch, code, AI, sculpture, and AR. I try to stay in a kind of superposition, where every possibility is available to me. Each finished piece is a measurement: one moment when all that potential collapses into something you can see or touch. Nothing is ever truly finished for me. I return to older works with new tools and new understanding, not to correct them but to continue a conversation with an earlier version of myself.

I use and interrogate emerging technologies as sites of possibility. Technology is not neutral. It can control or liberate, depending on who wields it and toward what ends. Error is one place where that becomes practical. Who decides what counts as an error? And, who does that determination harm? In my Motion Paintings, the screen is my canvas, an image is my palette, and error is my brush. In The Art of Protest, circuit-bent cameras and glitch processing obscure the faces that surveillance wants to harvest. It is corruption protecting people from corruption.

Code can also listen. In my generative work, live geomagnetic data and the Earth's seismic hum shape the image, so no two moments are alike. Every refresh is a new measurement, a new collapse of possibility, and a reminder that we are entangled with systems far larger than ourselves. In Recoded, I translate digital art back into ASCII, making infrastructure visible and celebrating when code doesn't hide.

My sculptural work makes the body a site of freedom, political argument, and ecological kinship. The body is the oldest technology we have. It knows things the mind doesn't, and it is much harder to manipulate: just ask your gut! In Colonized!, a female torso is wrapped in world maps, the borders of nations draped over the curves of a body, collapsing the distance between geopolitical control and bodily autonomy. The logic is the same: extract, divide, contain, own. In Realized!, a female torso is covered in deep space and opens like a book to reveal maps inside. The inner landscape is a book of knowledge, embodied and connected. Mother of Us All carries this theme further: a pelvis cradling the Earth in the birth canal, insisting that the land is not a resource to be managed but a body to be carried and born from.

I've spent more than thirty years making art and reading philosophy and science, and what keeps drawing me back is how often they point at the same thing. Quantum physics calls it entanglement, ancestral traditions call it kinship, and both echo the idea that nothing exists in isolation. Those perspectives have taught me to hold what I think I know and what I don't with equal curiosity. I intend to remain an artist and a student for life. Currently, I'm inspired by the work of Yuria Celidwen, David Bohm, and Carolina Figueiredo.

When you encounter my work, I hope you walk away feeling something: surprise, curiosity, delight, maybe discomfort. Some connect with the humor, others with the political critique, still others with pure aesthetic experience. What matters is that something shifts, that you leave having connected in some way.

Quantum Kinship is my practice.

Connection is my goal.

Curiosity is my constant.