About the Artist
Heather Timm is an experientially taught artist whose practice is an expression of Quantum Kinship. That is, a deep interconnection with all things as expressed by indigenous wisdom and quantum physics. Both traditions suggest that beneath physical reality lies an energetic, vibrating foundation of aliveness. Whether you call it entanglement or interconnectedness, there is active participation by observers in the creation of all things. In this sense, she believes the observer and everything she comes in contact with is as much artist and author as she is. Everything is a collaboration with Everything. In this way, her art holds the material and spiritual in superposition. Her practice follows that belief wherever it leads.
Working across mediums, she experiments at the intersection of the traditional and technological. Whether she is painting with a digital image, animating a traditional painting, building a sculpture in real life or extended reality, experimenting with circuit-bent cameras and photography, coding art using P5.js, or exploring generative AI and other emerging technologies, she exists in creative superposition. All of it a love letter to life and the ability to create, a protective incantation against control systems.
Based 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. 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
My work is a celebration of connection, curiosity, and life, as well as a defense against colonialism and exploitation. We live in a time that is veering dangerously away from wisdom, balance, and nature, toward a desire for singular truth, fixed identity, consolidated power, and predictable outcomes. This dominant worldview is driven by the logic of control systems. Surveillance capitalism, bodily regulation, technological determinism all assume you are one knowable thing that can be predicted, monetized, and contained.
Quantum Kinship refuses this. I bridge computational systems with a theory of knowledge that infuses indigenous relational wisdom. I am drawn to cyclical time over linear progress, non-binary being over forced categorization, invisible kinship over visible borders, glitch and error as sites of freedom. After all, error is relative to the system in control.
Everything I make is a collaboration with creation itself: material and spiritual, seen and unseen. My art is an expression of that connection and a means to physically make that connection visible. As each person views my art, they co-create with me. They bring new meaning to my work which in turn deepens my understanding of it. The art once observed is changed by the observer.
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. In my series The Art of Protest circuit-bent cameras document protests and street life, their corrupted sensors fragmenting faces into unrecognizable pixels—corruption protecting people from the corruption of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition. In Recoded, I transform digital art back into ASCII, making infrastructure visible, celebrating when code doesn't hide.
My sculpture work makes the body a site of freedom, political argument, and ecological kinship. In Colonize Me, 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. Mother of Us All extends this 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, cared for, nurtured. All You Are to Them turns the gaze on the present tense: a glass case layered with international currency, a disembodied hand holding a smartphone, scattered eyeballs. It is the complete inventory of what surveillance capitalism actually wants from you. Against all of this, This Is Your Brain on Art proposes something different. The skull is open. A figure moves inside a third eye. This is the knowing that lives beyond words, beyond measurement. It is insight as embodied, relational, and stubbornly free.
When you encounter my work, I hope you walk away feeling something: surprise, curiosity, delight, maybe discomfort. The work spans enough terrain that what resonates will be different for each person. Some connect with the humor. Others with 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.