Renaissance Woman
Kelly Heaton ’90 combines engineering, nature and art
BY JANA F. BROWN
When describing her career as an artist and its many influences in science, engineering and the natural word, Kelly Heaton ’90 frequently invokes the idea of consilience. The word describes the manner in which different academic realms, particularly science and the humanities, can come to a common, unified way of understanding a given topic — something that’s been described as “a jumping together of knowledge.” Heaton’s creative work largely revolves around the intersection of art and electrical engineering.
“My pursuit of consilience came through being a highly creative person who loves spirituality because I’m curious about the big questions of who we are and where we came from,” Heaton explains. “I’m also a nature fanatic, so trying to put those things all together in a world that asks you to be practical forced me into this modality.”
Heaton’s work has evolved over the course of a career that has spanned more than three decades. Her early inspirations can be traced to her days at St. Paul’s School, where she counts among her mentors teachers of art, mathematics, French and religious studies. It was at the School that she “got her legs as an artist.”
“To have that combination of supportive, critical feedback and the freedom to make decisions about the direction of your work is what makes artists the greatest they can be. It happens so rarely, but that’s what happened for me at St. Paul’s.”
— Kelly Heaton ’90
After St. Paul’s, Heaton went on to study urban planning and ecology at Yale. She had planned to attend veterinary school at North Carolina State, but when that path didn’t feel right, she applied for an MFA program at Tufts. Ultimately, however, during the maker revolution of the late ’90s, she found a place at the MIT Media Lab, where she later completed a Master of Science degree.
In her graduate classes, Heaton began to explore a budding interest in technology. She learned to write code, use laser cutters and work with circuits. She refers to that time as one of the most intellectually challenging of her life.
“I was like an artistic experiment,” she recalls. “MIT required me to collaborate intensely because there was no way for me to survive otherwise. It taught me how to basically do anything, because it was so difficult that I moved beyond my internal conversation about what I’m capable of and I just did it anyway.”
Her work today reflects that intersection of electrical engineering and art. Known for creating circuits that generate bird songs, Heaton has an interactive installation, “Circuit Garden,” on exhibit in Brooklyn. A 21-foot-wide artificial lawn that is “planted” with human-sized sculptural electronic devices, “Circuit Garden” uses analog electronic oscillator circuits to create vibrations that sound like birds and chirping crickets.
“They’re sculptural electronic components as large as you,” Heaton explains. “I did that so people could stand in front of electronic devices and see them as an extension of our own nature.”
As one of very few modern artists who combine art with electrical engineering, Heaton takes her inspiration from some of the greatest creators in history, including Leonardo da Vinci, a painter, scientist and engineer. As humans have become progressively reliant on technology run by circuits, Heaton says, she’s felt a desire to help educate people on what’s inside these machines.
“I can think like a poet and a humanist and I know how circuits work,” she says. “I understand machine intelligence at the foundational level.”
Her online biography describes Heaton as a “creative polymath,” noting that she is also a “self-taught perfumer, Tarot reader, life coach, mushroom hunter, foodie and former innovation consultant in the field of diabetes care.” Her versatility makes her a Renaissance woman, but Heaton is most interested in making connections between those seemingly disparate subjects.
“The relationship between all of the things is what matters to me,” she explains. “Because I’ve pushed myself to work in so many different fields, my art is not about those fields per se.”
Rather, it’s the consilience of those fields that drives Heaton’s work.
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See the installation of Heaton’s “Circuit Garden” in action below.