Stephanie Temma Heir’s On Those Blue Remembered Hills, executed in 2020, is a carefully balanced curation of saturated nature, hefty historical references and light-hearted elements of pop culture. Amidst scattered leaves, a bright blue mushroom lays tucked amongst a border of overly animated ceramic birds, worms and detritus. A trained painter and self-taught ceramicist, Heir creates her own recipes for all her glazes. Here, she splashes dark blues and dusty green glazes across her cartoon and iconic tweeting birds, visually tying them into the forested floor and forming a clever new relationship between painting and found-object sculptural frame.
Titled after a brief poem from A.E. Housman’s 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad, Heir’s composition becomes grounded in a more melancholic mood. The poem reads: “Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, what spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”i The work was first exhibited at Nino Mier Gallery’s 2020 show Gest, with the show at large reflecting on the meaning-making that took place during a time of global confinement. Even bearing this heavy load, Heir’s work creates a sense of levity amongst the seriousness and offers a fresh perspective through her expansion of what the genre of still life can be.