During the height of the pandemic, Ottawa artist Heidi Conrod created the Wildflowers series as a powerful meditation on strength and resilience. Using a Polaroid camera, she captures these hardy native species in situ - persistent landscapes where beauty and nature rise in even the harshest surroundings. “For me, wildflowers represent nature at its most optimum,” Conrod writes. “They appear faithfully year after year in the most unlikely places, and despite difficult conditions, they continue to show up full of grace and beauty. They became a metaphor for us in hard times.” Conrod paints directly onto the Polaroid, and then scans each piece so the paint becomes visually ‘fused’ with the photograph. The resulting works explore the dynamic between control and chance inherent in both mediums — the singular immediacy of instant photography and the expressive, unpredictable gestures of paint. With a 30-year multidisciplinary practice, Heidi Conrod has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States. Her work is included in both private and public collections.
