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= Colleen Heslin =

Colleen Heslin (born in 1976) is a Canadian mixed-media artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Heslin works predominantly with textiles and quilting in an abstract composition which she calls paintings.

Personal Life
Heslin graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with a BFA in photography in 2003. She also Graduated from Concordia University with a MFA in painting and Drawing.

Early Career
As young artist Heslin established The Crying Room, a retail unit on Cordova Street and Main Street in Vancouver used for exhibitions of other local artists. Her artist run exhibition space became a venue for many new and young artists with an emphasis on equal exposure to female and male artists. Heslin's distinct style of art was a

RBC Emerging Artist Contest
On October 2, 2013 Heslin was announced as the first place winner of the 15th Annual Royal Bank of Canada's Canadian Painting Competition for her painting titled Young and Wild and Free. She was praised for her "fresh approach to a traditional medium" with her usage of textiles and craft work. For her first place finish, Heslin recieved $25 000 and her piece was added to RBC's private art collection.

Style and Works
Heslin's latest series of paintings uses hand-dyed, previously owned domestic fabrics (ie. bed sheets, clothing) which are hung to dry in bunches resulting in a three-dimensional tromp-l'oeil affect on the fabrics. Heslin sews abstract shapes of fabric together in a method similar to quilting and then stretches the "abstract collage of cottons and linens" together around a frame. She developed this style around 2010 when she began keeping off-cuts of paintings for studies for future works. The titles of her works "reflect a gesture within the work" and hint at "landscapes of figures." The result has been compared to modernist abstract expressionist paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, specifically with the Colour Field painters. Heslin's usage of traditional craft work in her textiles and needlework is often linked to discussions of feminism in labour and art. Heslin has not been recorded using the word feminism about her own works but references the concept in interviews.

Critical Reception
Heslin's use of secondhand materials has been viewed as a comment on consumer excess. Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper compares Heslin's works to Matisse's paper cutouts and to Ludwig Sander's oil panels and describes her work is "the domestication or 'feminization' of the Colour Field machismo."

Exhibitions

 * Colleen Heslin: Needles and Pins, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2016

Influences

 * Sonia Delaunay
 * Jack Bush
 * Dan Christensen
 * William Perehudoff
 * Helen Frankenthaler