Heather Gabriel Smith

Heather Gabriel Smith is an artist and a cartographer. She lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia: her hometown and the subject of most of her art. Her primary medium is woodcut printmaking, but she also makes oil paintings and hand drawn maps.

Heather studied fine art at Queen’s Unicersity and cartography at the Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS NSCC). In addition to being an artist, she works for the software ompany Esri, where she writes tutorials about mapping. She has lived in British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, the Annapolis Valley, And southern California.

I’m especially drawn to form: lines and shapes. Do I practice woodcut printmaking, with its clearcut blacks and whites, because I’m drawn to form, or am I drawn to form because I practice woodcut printmaking? Whatever the cause, I love to capture the tangle of tree branches, the angles of rooftops, and the gestures of strangers. The woodcut medium forces me to translate what I see into something simpler, something stylized. I have to choose which lines and shapes are essential to the scene and discard everything else.