"If all continued to grow and grow, if there were no death, the world would be monstrous."
- excerpt from Artist's Statement, April 2013

Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art is pleased to present Light in the Dark, an exhibition of new sculptural and photographic works by Heidi Norton. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Light and living plants are Norton's primary mediums, channeled through glass, resin, wax, and studio detritus. Evocative of chlorophyll slides under a microscope lens, Norton's multi-disciplinary practice moves seamlessly between sculpture, installation and photography, allowing each process to inform and activate the other. Inspired by the unseen and natural life cycles inherent in all things, she creates works which draw parallels between natural and creative processes such as the generative consumption of light particles in both photography and photosynthesis, highlighting the processes of growth, decay, homeostasis and entropy.

For Light in the Dark, Norton is delving further into the connotations between the functionality of light and darkness in nature, the visible and invisible and how these modes of seeing are separated through time and space. The ability of - and necessity for - a particular light wavelength (infrared and ultraviolet) to activate something from an underground, dormant state, to one of growth, correlates to light enabling a photographic image to become an impression on a strip of film: a latent state that is invisible until developed in a darkroom. Intrigued by the notion that a dark space is necessary for these creative cycles to form life and art, Norton's works address the cyclical themes of overlapping biospheres, darkness, and latency - the invisible processes at work in the course of nature.