Heather Charley​

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Abstract Landscapes of the Interior

 

I’m a Chicago-based artist who spent 53 days at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee during the spring of 2024. My traumatically injured leg subsequently sent a worm-like blood clot to my lungs and stopped my heart.

 

Upon release, I was initially homebound, and my art practice was limited to a small apartment space and suited means: drawing and water-based media on paper, and collage for building shallow sculptural depth. I explored abstracted ways of representing trauma and the journey from damage into healing.

 

This body of work (severed into 30 parts) continues this visual research and is, appropriately, being shown in a revisitation to Milwaukee, at Var Gallery, two years after my departure from Froedtert.  

 

Balancing abstraction and narrative, with themes and subject matter including:

•       rent flesh/imperfect healing--torn paper/torn skin, ruptures, damaged nerves, cutting to heal, hypergranulating flesh, scarring

•       tunnels (arterial, cannular) into and through the body, and psychological portals through and away from trauma

 

On January 23rd 2026, while in the midst of this art making marathon, and unrelated to the previous surgeries, I had a large benign lipoma removed from my back. This fatty excised mass makes a few appearances in this series, as a continuation of the theme.

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