About the Artist
Heather Timm is a Seattle-based transdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between the material and the digital. She might paint with an image, animate a painting, or build a sculpture that exists in the room, in virtual reality, or both. She approaches each new idea as an open field of potential rather than a fixed outcome. Her practice is motivated by 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's work has been exhibited at the United Nations Summit of the Future, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Awards in Rome, Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, Scope Art Show Miami, and the University of Chicago's Media Arts, Data, and Design Center. 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 the book HUG 100 Photographers to Watch.
Artist Statement
We live in a time that wants you to be one knowable thing: categorizable, measurable, predictable. 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.
Technology is not neutral. It can control or protect, 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? I answer by putting error to work. 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 Ambient Seismic Noise, thousands of hot pink particles flow along invisible currents, imitating the microseismic hum that ocean waves create when they strike the seafloor. The Earth’s heartbeat, made visible. No two runs are alike, and every refresh is a new measurement 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. Scan the piece with your phone and the borders blur, the whole map washing down like wet paint. In Realized!, a female torso is covered in deep space and opens like a book to reveal maps inside, an inner landscape of embodied knowledge. Mother of Us All is 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 over thirty years making art and reading philosophy and science, and what keeps drawing me back is how often they point at the same thing: nothing exists in isolation. Quantum physics calls it entanglement, ancestral traditions call it kinship, and my art is an expression of both. I call this quantum kinship.
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.