Heather Evans Smith

Another great body of work from our Issue 12 submissions, Dina Mitrani of Dina Mitrani Gallery selected Heather Evans Smith as one of her favorites, and we can see why!

Heather Evans Smith lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work reflects her southern roots, motherhood, womanhood and a whimsical imagination she relied on as an only child in a rural town. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions nationwide, magazines, literary journals and online publications. She has been invited as a guest lecturer at colleges, universities and photography conferences such as Australian Exposure in the Gold Coast, Australia and the Real Life photography conference in Alberta, Canada. Her first monograph, Seen Not Heard, was published by Flash Powder Projects in 2016.

Seen Not Heard

For the past few years I have been creating images to express the emotions of motherhood.
My daughter has never been included in those images. But as she has grown from a baby
into a force of nature all her own, I was drawn to pull her into my world of conceptual
photography and explore our relationship during a time when emotions of love, stress
and confusion are high.

Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage “To Be Seen and Not Heard”,
a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images
are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent
and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the
tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger,
path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also
exists a distance inherent between two different individuals.

To view more of Heather’s work please visit her website.