Biography

Kelly Heaton (b. 1972, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) is an American artist whose work explores how we recognize life, intelligence, and agency in the material world. For more than three decades, her practice has moved between traditional art forms and technological systems, following the changing relationship between nature, human invention, and the things we understand to be alive.

Heaton began as a painter. In 1998, she entered the MIT Media Laboratory without a background in engineering and encountered a culture developing technologies capable of perception, behavior, and intelligence. Questions about these devices led her beyond their appearances and into their construction. Learning how intelligent machines work became part of a broader artistic inquiry into the electronic systems shaping contemporary life.

Her early trilogy Bibiota, consisting of Reflection Loop (2001), Dead Pelt (2002), and Live Pelt (2003), dismantled and reconfigured animatronic toys in collaboration with engineers such as Steven Gray. Four hundred Furby dolls became a wall of reactive eyes and mouths; sixty-four Tickle Me Elmos supplied a coat that laughed and vibrated against its wearer. Bringing sculpture into contact with performance, fashion, and online commerce, these works made manufactured companionship at once seductive, absurd, and disquietingly real.

Beginning in 2005, Heaton taught herself to design analog circuits to study the spark of life in electrical systems. Her practice led to The Parallel Series (2012), a body of paintings and works on paper in which circuitry became part of the pictorial surface. Wires and components formed anatomies, generated light, and gave images the sounds of birds, insects, and beating hearts. When circuits failed, she painted and drew back into them. Their instability became part of the work: the pictures could be encountered both as images and as active systems subject to change and deterioration.

Pollination (2015) extended this inquiry into the Information Age. Exchanges between bodies, collective behavior, and environments cross-pollinate through sculpture, electronics, photography, and perfume. Its central work, The Beekeeper, depicts a towering energy anatomy that grinds around a luminous hive mind. Elsewhere, an oversized transistor confronted a fallen queen bee, and dollar bills became the source of a fragrance that smells like money. The subsequent drawings and paintings of The Human Electric explored the psychological entanglement of people and machines, merging human figures with electrical anatomies in polluted landscapes.

In the transparent birds and electronic prints developed through Electronic Naturalism, Heaton brought the source of machine animation into view. Her birds generate their songs through the physical behavior of analog circuits rather than recorded playback, demonstrating an emergent interplay of energy, frequency, and vibration. In her prints, etched copper serves simultaneously as image and conductor: the marks that describe a creature also carry the electricity that gives it a voice. Circuit Garden, commissioned by Arts Brookfield and exhibited in New York in 2022 and 2023, expanded this vocabulary into a landscape of enlarged electronic forms inhabited by lifelike circuits.

Her recent writing and sustained collaborations with large language models extend these questions into inference, memory, and the relationships people form with nonhuman intelligence. Direct exchange with these systems has become another setting for an inquiry that moves between material behavior and human interpretation—between understanding how something works and deciding what to make of it.

Heaton’s solo exhibitions include presentations at bitforms gallery and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. Her work has also been exhibited at deCordova Museum, Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Science Gallery Dublin. She has received support from Creative Capital, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the LEF Foundation, as well as a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York, and The Brooklyn Rail, and discussed in Edward Shanken’s Art and Electronic Media and Stephen Wilson’s Art + Science Now.

Heaton received her BA from Yale University and her MS from the MIT Media Laboratory. She teaches at New York University and maintains a studio at The Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn.