Heather Day: Sinuous Bodies

The Pit is pleased to present Sinuous Bodies, a solo exhibition of new works by California artist Heather Day. This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from January 25 - March 1, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 25, from 5-7 pm with the artist present.

In a new body of work, Heather Day showcases her innovative approach to abstract painting, in which the canvas becomes a tactile archive of memory and time. Through her distinctive cuts, stitches, and tears, Day mines her artistic practice as an inexhaustible repertoire of biomorphic forms, weaving fragments of past canvases together to create dynamic new compositions that reference the natural world.

A restless spirit of innovation enlivens Day’s artistic practice as she draws on and reimagines the history of modern painting, including Helen Frankenthaler’s stains and the sculptural interventions of Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings. Tilting, flicking, and pouring acrylic pigment, she creates sinuous passages of color and rhythmic bodily shapes that seem to float and shift across the canvas, forming a visual record of gesture and movement. As the painter explains, “I’ve started to embrace the idea of painting with my sewing machine,” Day explains. “There’s a unique quality to the sewn line—it demands a deliberate carving of a path, a conscious negotiation of how to enter and exit the space. The limitations and constraints of sewing imbue the work with a distinct form, much like the act of walking shapes the body, mind and surrounding landscape.”

At the same time, Day’s signature method of cutting and sewing her paintings into composite forms places her in dialogue with 20th-century innovations in material disruption, such as Hannah Höch’s photomontages and Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases. Working within this legacy, Day meticulously assembles painted fragments on the floor within the frame of a stretcher bar before sewing them into lush compositions, each mapping the progression of her artistic practice over time. 

Yet, for Day, the act of cutting is not merely a formal device but a conceptual strategy—a way of reflecting the layered nature of perception. Like Proust’s concept of involuntary memory, the artist’s stitched canvases summon fragments of past gestures, colors, and forms, each imbued with emotional and sensory resonance. At the same time, the meticulous physicality of her process recalls a more deliberate kind of memory: a muscle memory honed through repetition, where familiar gestures are revisited and reimagined across multiple iterations. In Day’s work, the interplay between these two modes of remembering—one unpredictable and fluid, the other structured and practiced—creates a framework for preserving fragments of the past while confronting the pain of memory’s inevitable erosion.