Heidi Mortensen

Heidi Mortensen is a mixed media sculptor and installation artist. Using the figure and natural elements including birds, branches, and wings, she delves into the liminal moments between constraint and liberation. Her detailed sculptural work involves casting in glass, metal, resin, and plaster, and incorporates clay, wood, thread, fabric, ash, salvaged, and personal objects.

Mortensen received an MFA in the Sculpture Dimensional Studies Program at Alfred University, New York, and a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Hawai’i. In between these two degrees, she pursued atelier training in figure sculpting at the Barcelona Academy of Art to deepen her understanding of the architecture of the human body.

Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions and, in 2025, will be shown in a solo exhibition at Urban Glass (Brooklyn, NY). In 2024, she received a fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris, France. Originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i, Mortensen currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana, and has work in private collections in San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu.


Artist Statement

This sculptural series explores states of release and the transformative process of letting go, capturing pivotal moments of liberation. Through the translucency of cast resin, I evoke the weightlessness and dissolution that accompanies the unburdening of constraints—whether self-imposed or societal. The women, wings, birds, and feathers depicted are caught in the act of breaking free, their forms suspended between confinement and freedom.

These works present viewers with liminal moments in the liberation process: a wing hovers between enclosure and flight, a woman floats in suspension as bindings unravel around her form. In Captive Flight, the release occurs from within as birds soar upward through the transparent medium. The resin’s ethereal quality amplifies the sense of transcendence, making tangible those fleeting instants when we shed what confines us.

By crystallizing these transient moments of breakthrough, the sculptures invite contemplation of our own processes of release and the profound lightness that emerges when we finally let go.


www.heidimortensenart.com