Heather Corey '05
Sculptor/Paper Artist
Hometown: Glen Rock, NJ
Connections form in childhood that remain, later to surface and influence our choices as adults. Heather Corey ’05 recalls gardening with her mother as a child, when she would collect flowers and press them. Today, Corey creates art with paper that she makes by hand.
“In my senior year at Moravian, I did an honors thesis with Doug Zucco, who makes his own paper,” says Corey. “I studied 10 plant types and made each into a unique paper type.”
At Zucco’s encouragement, Corey pursued an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she began challenging the medium and sculpting with paper. She earned her degree in 2007 and took a high school teaching position as she continued to create her art. In 2008, she came up with the idea for her ongoing body of work Love Corsetry—a series of sculptures of women’s torsos. “I first take a plaster cast of the torso and later build and develop the piece with paper pulp,” explains Corey.
“The finished love corset is my expression of each woman and the culmination of my passion for paper and sculpture with the beauty of the female form.”
Corey’s first model was a friend who, during the casting process, shared stories from her life. This personal connection became part of the process. “Now as I work with different models, I ask them to tell me their stories,” says Corey, who is compiling those stories into an accompanying book.
As the work continues, the process has evolved, with Corey encouraging the models to break out of the static sitting position and twist their torsos in some way. “I’m capturing a moment in these women, and movement goes further to express that moment,” Corey explains. The plan is to build a body of work that will feature 100 different love corsets and the women behind them.
“Whether they are vulnerable or strong, confident or unsure, they all share a thread that makes them different and the same—feminine motion,” Corey says. “The finished love corset is my expression of each woman and the culmination of my passion for paper and sculpture with the beauty of the female form.”