Welcome

My name is Lucy Mathews Heegaard.

I am a multidisciplinary artist who uses writing, photography, sound recording, and video production to tell stories of who we are at our essence—before we are shaped and shifted by our experiences in the world. At the heart of my work is the human voice, spoken story, first-hand accounts of life experiences. The relationship between memory and self is integral to everything I create.

This video, produced as an assignment for a course in my Master of Fine Arts program, was a response to a prompt that asked us to explore an art form with which we had no experience to see what that art form could teach us about ourselves and our work. I chose dance because it was the medium that intimidated me most.

By combining multiple forms of media, my stories engage multiple senses at once, offering the viewer an immersive, intimate, visceral experience of the story, beyond what any one element might conjure on its own.

My stories are an invitation to each of us to find our wholeness—because I believe our individual wholeness helps us find our collective wholeness, and our collective wholeness helps us toward compassion and care for ourselves and for one another. 

who are we before the world tells us who we ought to be?

Or, in the vocabulary of Buddhism, what is your Original Face, the face you had before your parents were born?