Andrea Joyce Heimer Me, Alone In The Florida Swamp With My Echo, 2024

Me, Alone In the Florida Swamp with my Echo is an acrylic and pencil painting on wood panel.

The painting features a central pink figure, naked and rendered in a two-dimensional style, surrounded by the plant and animal life in the Florida Keys mangroves. A zig-zag white line emerges from the central figure, suggesting a call into the wilderness. The composition of the piece itself mirrors these diagonal lines with different animals and trees twisting through the work, sometimes in conversation and conflict with one another and other times alone. At the bottom of the work lie bones of dead animals, whereas the top of the painting ends in multiple pools of clear blue water in which swim herons, flamingos, and alligators.

Like many of Heimer’s works, this painting refers to her own loneliness and personal story of adoption. Heimer was adopted at birth in a closed adoption, meaning that neither she nor her adoptive parents were provided with information on her biological mother and father. A few years ago, she was able to gain access to the sealed records with her birth parents’ names and contacted her biological mother. Her biological father was harder to track down until last December when she Googled him once more and found his obituary. Heimer describes it as a “complex sort of grief over someone I'd never known, and it felt very lonely to not be mentioned in the obituary as a surviving family member.” He died in Florida, so this painting is set in the mangroves in the Florida Keys. The figure represents the artist, alone and calling out with only her echo in response.