Today we’d like to introduce you to Heidi Schwegler.
Hi Heidi, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I woke up one morning in 2018 and suddenly realized that I had been in Portland, OR, teaching college for nearly 20 years! Feeling a sense of urgency, I knew it was time to mix things up, change the scenery and step away from all comforts. So, in an extremely impulsive move (literally in the span of about 24 hours) my husband and I quit our careers and moved to the Mojave Desert.
We now live in a 1950 cinder block ranch on 2 acres in Yucca Mesa, which is right next to Joshua Tree, CA. The dirt roads are bumpy, the heat and the force of the winds are very real, and the flora and fauna are doing everything they can to survive. It is a complete 180 from the Pacific Northwest, and I absolutely love it here. Our location is rural so I knew that if I didn’t bring the people to me, I would become a complete recluse, so I began writing the business plan for Yucca Valley Material Lab (YVML), an artist residency and workshop program that would be located in a Quonset hut that I had built on our property. Within 5 months of moving here, I was working with the first artist in residence.
The program offers residencies, internships, workshops, and a variety of public events. Artist residencies last two weeks and include lodging, full access to the Lab, technical assistance, and opportunities for community engagement. The range of workshops is vast and includes techniques such as neon, bronze foundry casting, glass casting, and welding. YVML also has a reputation as being a venue for very special musicians and performers. We’ve recently hosted Senyawa from Indonesia, Les Filles de Illig Hadad from Niger, and Marshall Trammell from the Bay area. The past twenty years of being an artist, instructor, and administrator have all come together to bring me this magical life-based in this gorgeous desert.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I had completely romanticized the notion of starting over, of having an opportunity to redefine who I am and to meet all of the challenges that come with moving to a completely different ecology and community. All of that has been incredible, but it has also been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. The weather here is extreme, and even though I absolutely love the heat, the Santa Ana winds are relentless. The lack of water and the heat also create an ecology in which everything is just trying to survive: the flora, the fauna, and even significant parts of our community. If I hadn’t started a public-facing program, tapping into a new social community would have been a much slower process. Thankfully YVML and my newest endeavor, Lazy Eye Gallery, has instantly given me access to an overwhelming number of amazing and creative people. There are so many artists out here, and because our population is still relatively small, it is a tight-knit community. Everyone is clearly here to help and support one another.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
In 2009, after eleven years maintaining a studio practice and full-time teaching position, my studio was feeling claustrophobic, my connection to the work was distant, and my community felt limited. I had a strong desire for expansion—to step out of the vacuum and engage in something new and unexpected. I suddenly hit on the notion that I needed to begin living my research, not reading about someone else’s thoughts and experiences. So, I left. After 28,000 miles of travel and four residencies, I became reacquainted with myself and discovered that I have an affinity for the ruin, non-sites, and discarded objects.
Since 2018, my sculptural/installation work has been focused solely on my immediate surroundings: the Mojave Desert. A combination of the Santa Ana winds and the ‘stickiness’ of the surrounding flora (cholla cactus, Joshua trees, yuccas, and creosote) renders this location as a sort of eddy. I wander and rescue haphazardly disused scraps: packing foam, plastic grocery bags, Amazon Prime boxes, broken signs, crumpled chain-link, shredded tires. Plastic, metal, fiber, and rubber: these materials decay but never decompose. Back in the studio, I resynthesize these sources into facsimiles with cast glass, gold, silver, wax, resulting in investigations of overlapping ideas of mortality, consumption, and coping mechanisms, often finding in them beauty and disquieting humor. Most recently, I have been casting large pieces of sunbaked packing foam into glass, and I have been powder coating crushed chain link fencing that inimitable color of our sunsets – a pinkish-gray mauve.
Starting a program dedicated to uninhibited exploration of new techniques and processes satisfies my love and obsession for material, and the Mojave Desert, in turn, has inspired my studio practice. It’s brutal, it’s beautiful, and every day allows me to see things again for the first time.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.heidischwegler.com or www.yvml.org
- Instagram: Heidi_schwegler or yuccavalleymaterial
