Heidi Jensen - Landlooker
October 10 - November 1, 2025

Heidi Jensen - Landlooker

Inventory

1.  The Logjam

Backdrop layer: Flashe vinyl on canvas, 10’ x 14’
Puppet layers: ink and gouache on cardboard, rope, pulleys, cleats

1.  Landlooker, video, time: 13:08:17
2.  Top to bottom: 

    On the River, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
    The Round River, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
The Cavalry, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
Log Stamps, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”

1.  Top to bottom: 

Here They Come, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
The Problem, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
The Matrious Lumberjacks, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
Stump Field, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”

1.  Top to bottom:

Teeth, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 30” x 22”
Corlea Figure, Iron Age, Ireland, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 30” x 22”
Paul’s Boots, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 30” x 22”

1.   Top to bottom: 

Piledriver, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
Lac Courte Oreilles v. Voigt, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
Doughnuts and Beans, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”
Burned and cutover, charcoal and gouache on BFK Rives, 22” x 30”

1.  The Logging Camp with Lumberjacks and Spruce Grouse

Canvas backdrop: Ink on canvas, 72” x 102”
Suspended hams: Ink and gouache on cardboard, dowel, pulley and rope, 2’x60”
Puppets: basswood, milk paint, fabric, 36” x 4” x 5” each

Heidi Jensen - Landlooker

Artist Statement

Drawing is at the center of my studio practice and is used to understand, transform and invent. With my current project, Landlooker, I am responding to the way land was changed in the 19th and 20th centuries, when vast stands of old-growth forests were logged in the upper Midwest, Northeast and Pacific Northwest. I am addressing historical processes of extraction and the aftermath of ecological devastation left in the wake of logging. Accompanying this is an interest in the technologies and methods of transforming the landscape, a reflection on how biological entities are seen, analyzed, measured, turned into units and objects. This work explores logging culture and formations of American masculinity related to this labor history that continue to circulate today. With this work, I seek to tell a complex and textured story about this period of time.

This project includes a video, the puppets, props and drawn backdrops used in the video, and a series of drawings. Constructed with paper, unstretched canvas, wood and cardboard, this project is intended to look provisional, a deliberate echo of the temporary nature of logging camps. In a time dominated by screens and digital images, the materiality of this work gestures to the rough-hewn nature of logging and the physical labor that powered it. Working from historical photographs, I use drawing to study, interpret and recreate this disappeared world of the late 1800s to early 1900s. 

The puppet video features carved wooden puppets performing songs written and sung in lumber camps. The versions of these ballads I use are field recordings from the early 1900s, part of the Alan Lomax Collection in the Library of Congress. Juxtaposed with puppet narratives are photographs documenting landscapes, spaces and conditions of this labor. Many of the photographs were created for the Farm Security Administration by Russell Lee, a project which documented American life and work, also dating to the early 1900s. The songs and photographs share the realities and texture of this history: the difficulty and peril of the labor, the difference in status between the low-paid lumberjacks and the profiteering timber barons, the devastated landscape. 

The machine-like nature of this work, and the unrelenting manner in which the lumber companies rolled over the land and consumed the forests, are represented in drawings through armies of tools like axes and log stamps, and through dining operations that provided vast quantities of food. Logjams, an event present in the puppet video and a subject of many drawings, presented a flaw in the machine-like logging system; a moment when the fallen trees misbehaved and clogged the rivers, creating overwhelming, massive, dangerous pileups that had to be dislodged manually by log drivers or by dynamite. In photographs of these, the water in the river is completely obscured and a massive crust of bristling timber takes its place. In my drawings, these logs are given bright, concentric rings, an indication that the organism had a role in life, other than becoming lumber, that went unrecognized and unprotected.



Artist Bio

Heidi Jensen’s practice begins with and returns to drawing, and expands into puppets, printmaking and soft sculpture. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a BFA from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Her current project, Landlooker, explores the history, labor culture and ecological impact of logging. Her studio is based in Providence, RI.

Recent projects have been shown in solo exhibitions at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City (Sit Quietly In A Darkened Room And Think Of Nothing, 2019); the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin (Everything Is For You Until You Discover You Are For It, 2021), the Abington Art Center in Pennsylvania (Solo Series Fall 2019). In the past few years, her drawings and soft sculpture have been shown at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation and Museum in Ireland, at the New Bedford Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and at the Vashon Arts Center in Washington State. She is a fellow of several residency programs, including Monson Arts in Monson, Maine, the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York and La Napoule Foundation in Mandelieu-La Napoule France.