“Impressions emerge and intertwine in a process of making the work. Dream material, historical influences, things found and lost; all carry traces of human touch, use and imagination. These fragments combine and create an interior sense of belonging—to play out within personal and public arenas; to coalesce into alchemies of place.”

Deborah Hede (b.1959), an artist based in the Los Angeles area, creates drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Her process can read as a diagram of thought, where precision gives way to improvisation. Ideas take shape through serial repetition, and engage dream imagery that references both personal and historical influences.

The grid is a central element in Hede’s work, not as a system of control, but as a living framework. Unlike the rigid, impersonal grids of Minimalism, Hede’s are tactile and contingent. They often appear as delicate lines and wire armatures; subtle scaffolding beneath layered materials. Her interventions destabilize perceived order.

Hede’s recent watercolors continue to situate the image within a grid. These works recall the landscape of Abiquiu, New Mexico. The muted gradations of color articulate the atmospheric effects of desert twilight, distant mesas, and subtle shifts of light over land.

The pencil-drawn grid provides a scaffolding that gently buckles under the liquidity of watercolor through which color, transparency, and air circulate. Within this framework, triangular and folded planes emerge like origami forms or portals, suggesting a topography that is both inward and expansive. The compositions convey the architectural and geologic; both human and cosmic.

With this body of work, Hede continues her inquiry into “alchemies of place.” They are meditations on how external terrain becomes internalized—how a place once walked is then dreamed—to impart the visionary in art.