LORI HEPNER
Artist Statement
My practice, Drawing with Light, transforms lived experiences into visual form through movement-based processing. In my current Something About the Sky series, I photograph skies during significant life moments. These include my father's heart transplant, pandemic isolation, and alpine meadows. I then reperform these memories through "sky dances" in the studio. Custom LED arrays programmed with these sky photographs generate light traces during long-exposure photography, translating emotional experience into visible form.
This methodology emerged from discovering my neurodivergence in 2019, understanding that I require physical movement to process information meaningfully. What I had developed as artistic practice was actually neurological necessity. Movement functions as my primary mode of translation between internal processing and external expression. The studio becomes a space where I can respond to experiences language cannot address: being jolted awake by emergency sirens for a tornado no weather app predicted, trusting my body's reading of pressure changes, tearing up watching a sunset from an alpine valley; tearing up watching a sunset from the backseat of an Uber.
My community-centered public art projects where I bring my technology to draw with others began with Color Beechview (2018) for the City of Pittsburgh. I worked with UPMC Mercy Hospital to bring light painting to patients, families, health practitioners, and community members for the new Pavilion building, home to the UPMC Rehabilitation and Vision Institutes (2023). I continue this offshoot of my practice, which is much more figurative as it includes actual people from projects’ communities concurrently with my ongoing studio work: Something About the Sky and Cloud Controls.