Caitlin Heffernan

Heffernan's painting practice is rooted in an embodied, sensory process that privileges intuition and material responsiveness over fixed outcomes. Rather than working toward a predetermined image, She allows the act of making to guide her-each layer, mark, and gesture informing her next in a fluid, dialogic exchange with the work itself. This approach has become more defined during her MA studies, where She's leaned into the unknown as a generative force. The paintings unfold as ecosystems: sites of growth, erosion, and transformation. Heffernan explores dualities-macro and micro, biological and geological, visible and invisible-through layered surfaces that mirror organic cycles. Her process often feels alive, as if the painting is evolving through her rather than being controlled by her. Recently, Heffernan reintroduced sand as a central material. It serves both as substance and symbol: anchoring the work in elemental matter while alluding to the unseen forces that shape land and memory. Sand speaks to the earth's tactile, shifting terrain-its ability to hold, conceal, and renew. Underlying her work is an interest in the interconnectedness of all things-the human and non-human, land and body, sea and sky. She returns often to the four classical elements as frameworks through which she explores cosmological forces and environmental cycles. Through this practice, Heffernan hopes to create a space where viewers can attune to the rhythms of the natural world, not as passive observers but as participants within an entangled, living system.