Heather Scott Peterson is an artist, designer, essayist, curator, and educator. Her work explores the idioms of matter and its various behaviors as the substances that compose the world. Throughout her creative career, she has made work in nearly every art and design discipline, maintaining a studio practice which has also functioned as a design/build atelier and a conceptual consultancy. From 2023 to 2024, she was the Director of Not There Gallery in Los Angeles. She has been a MacDowell Fellow, a resident of the Instituto Internazionale di Architettura, and a founding member of Fünf Design Collective. She received a BFA in Painting and Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design, with a concentration in Creative Writing from Brown University, and holds a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She is a Professor of Architecture and Design at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.
Peterson's project at the Academy, Etchings and Accretions, explores the inimitable petrifying waters of Rome and the depositional affairs of calcium carbonate in its fountains, aqueducts, and quotidian plumbing, tendering an elegy to the evanescing character of these waters and their bacterial companions. We have been taught to regard stone as inert, lifeless, and immutable, but the emergence of geomicrobiology as a scientific discipline has unveiled the involvement of microorganisms in geological and geochemical processes, fomenting an indivisible relationship between the living and non-living. Microbial life not only influences the formation of stone, it composes it. If we imagine the founding of Rome in geomicrobial terms, the city began not in 753 BCE with mythical demigods suckling a she-wolf, but millions of years earlier in a sedimentary adagio of bacteria and skeletal remains that settled on the seafloor and around the mouths of mineral springs, resolving through compaction into a calcareous family of limestones.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
I have been working on a project that is literally composed of the matter of the city by way of the geological processes that happen in and amongst Rome's constructed environment (sedimentary deposition, seismic activity, geomicrobial action). Much of it happens quite quickly, but often in ways that are not particularly legible. A long-format residency has allowed for time to work with these geological processes in the studio and discover others that I was not previously aware of through the knowledge of others in the community, be it fellows, advisors, or affiliated scholars.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
It has been a true embarrassment of riches to have been able to work in one of the Academy's pavilions, not only because it is a space that was specifically designed for the production of sculpture, but for the first time in a long time, I have been able to see an entire body of work all at once as it emerges, and to have a more immediate understanding of the bigger questions that the project is trying to ask through its various parts. It has also been a huge gift to have our days framed by the conviviality at the table each day. It is not uncommon to have an encounter or a conversation at lunch or dinner with someone who is exactly the person you need to meet at that moment, or that utterly reorders your universe.
Have any encounters—with people, places, new information—opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
Since late February, Adam Summers, one of the Fellows in Environmental Arts & Humanities, has been collaborating with me on a petrification fountain which has been flowing continuously in a corner of the studio. He has helped me adapt an eighteenth-century Tuscan technique for rapidly precipitating calcium carbonate out of water to produce limestone. I have been consulting with scientists for several years, but this was the first occasion I have had to work with someone intimately on a project, under the same roof, and with time to tinker, observe, and iteratively develop work together.
What are you hoping to explore or deepen in the remaining months of your residency?
There are only several weeks left in the formal residency, but I have been working with material behaviors that are inimitable and deeply Roman. I know that I will return.