Heide Hatry was once teaching Art part-time and only making it modestly in the little free time she had as a mother and a business partner. During this time, she began to make things in almost any medium imaginable. “I was always arranging, re-arranging, transforming, imagining other ways [things] might be.” During her first 10 years as a full-time artist, Hatry worked primarily with animal remains from the local slaughterhouse. Having grown up on an industrial pig-farm – the project invoked a great deal of intimate memories and feelings in addition to the obvious existential and political dimensions. Her large-scale projects have always been collaborations, dialogues with writers, poets and thinkers. “My relationship to material is basically the same thing: I am listening to it, hearing it, responding to it and collaborating with it, and I try to attune my audience to our dialogue as well.” Her work questions the nature of reality, truth and illusion as well as the meaning of identity, particularly gendered existence and gender construction. Her latest work is made with human ashes. Titled Icons in Ash, these mosaics are realistic portraits made from the ashes of their subjects. Heide works from her place on the Upper West Side when in New York and has a second studio in Pennsylvania.