Visual artist Heather Harvey has been commissioned to create an art installation in conjunction with our Picnic with the Arts Summer Series. The proposed work, Greenbelt EarthSplash, is designed to be a temporary site-specific circular “earthwork” carved into the ground at Greenbelt Park in Big Stone Gap. Harvey has described the goal of the piece as creating “an unexpected moment of surprise that is both eerie and delightful, in order to bring a sense of mystery, joy, wonder, and humor for passing parkgoers.”

Heather Harvey is an Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Washington College. Harvey creates site-specific installations and objects that straddle traditional boundaries between painting, drawing and sculpture. She is interested in hidden infrastructures and invisible ordering mechanisms – things like gravity, quantum physics, and radio waves, but also the human body, memory, and contradictory emotions like aversion and affection. Her work is suggestive of mental and emotional landscapes and internal unfolding thought processes.