It has become increasingly clear to me that I keep returning to particular themes, albeit from different perspectives and using different materials and media. My work has developed in a spiral rather than a straight line.

Human psychology has always been an integral part of my work, whether figurative or abstract. Looking back on my work, it has always been about change, movement, understanding, shifting one’s perspective and finding a way through and forward: the tasks of a lifetime. 

For me, this is a function of any art form: to test and expand our intellectual and emotional growth.

My sculptures and paintings may come from my own impulses and drives but they are ‘completed’ by viewers who bring their own experiences to the mix. Maybe the result is a shift in one’s perspective…?

“The narrative, deeply rooted in the psychological, which light-footedly stages the dramas of the everyday in the sense of Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’, is a consistent characteristic in the work of Heather Allen.” Dr Alexander Tolnay