Creativity Unearthed H.C. Davis

Archaeology and Art are intertwined for me. I once spent my days creating precise illustrations of detailed artifacts for archives or digging artifacts out of the ground. By night I was covered in oil paint or clay slip. I’ve examined the nature of art and the diffusion of creative ideas; I’ve painted the undulating walls of a lava tube or the shape of a rock on canvas to release the details.

Art is in everything that is around us. It is in the chair we sit in, the pots we cook with, the toothbrush, the lamp. Creativity has been part of human life since the beginning of consciousness; it exists in utilitarian objects as well as sacred.


They say that all abstraction comes from something. But the moment an ‘Idea’ reveals itself to a person, it begins as an abstract thought until they make the item- until they make what will one day be an artifact. Abstraction is a necessary for reality to form. Abstraction is the question, Reality is often the answer. But when Abstraction remains, it causes us to look a bit deeper into our own psyche- an often uncomfortable moment.

Whether I am sculpting in clay, silversmithing, painting, or creating collage, my work is full of hints of nature, history and our humanity. I often zoom in on a detail often missed- the bubbles forming in foam around a rock in a stream or the inside of a wave.
One need not paint the whole ocean to see the wave just as one need not paint the forest to know one is among the trees.


A published Artist and Writer, Heather currently resides in the East Mountains of New Mexico.