For her first artist residency at Tamarind, Heidi Pollard arrived with a box of painted color samples and a book with hundreds of small drawings in ink and gouache. Her work as a painter is guided by her inherent sense of color and rooted in her practice of drawing. Throughout the residency she experimented with multiple drawing tools and many variations in color, working on stone and with aluminum plates before honing in on the many possibilities of pure line and layering of color which are inherent to lithography.
The Slot Machine series, with the fluid line and endearing forms of her emblematic drawing style, brings her unique visual vocabulary to the front in pure black, layered on to a deceptively simple ground of creamy white and green grey inks. The appearance is one of a black & white print, but in actuality there are four colors of ink used to achieve the calligraphic sequence and restrained ground. The deep black forms line up in a grid, a central organizing structure for much of her work, but here they also read as the random spinning symbols of a slot machine. Humor and word play permeates her work, as an inclusive gesture to the viewer, a way of drawing one in for a closer read.
Pollard is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant for painters and sculptors, a Roswell Artist in Residence Program fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. She lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.