“Exploring the Threshold”

Heidi Wanzek is an artist born in North Dakota who currently lives and works in Northern Minnesota. She earbed her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited in galleries across the midwest, most recently showing work at Duluth Art Institute Downtown in Duluth, MN. Her piece “Not Afraid” was featured as the cover art for Volume 6, Issue 4 of Great Lakes by Design Magazine.
Minnesota-based artist Heidi Wanzeck’s work begins not in the studio, but in the deliberate act of noticing, gathering, and waiting for each material — tree limbs, lake-worn debris, seed pods, and industrial remnants. She sits with these elements, allowing them to reveal their stories, and then intentionally transforms them. The resulting sculptural works explore the fragile and powerful connections between life and death.
At some point, the assembly of fragments becomes a whole — as Wanzek describes it, passing “the threshold into existence and vitality.”