Haven Lindsey
Haven Lindsey works primarily in oil paint and collage, with occasional use of textiles. Their practice is guided less by a fixed medium or style than by the demands of a particular idea. Painting and collage offer distinct ways of working: one builds imagery from the ground up, while the other begins with existing fragments and reorganizes them into a new form.
Collage has long been a private part of Lindsey’s process. It offered a way to collect images, process experience, and build meaning from material already in circulation. More recently, they have brought collage into the work they share publicly, placing it in direct conversation with paint. The shift reflects an ongoing interest in how different materials alter an idea as it is translated into an image.
For Lindsey, art is itself a form of translation. Thoughts, emotions, and impressions begin as part of an internal world, then change as they are made visible through paint, paper, texture, and composition. Each medium preserves some aspects of an original feeling while emphasizing or obscuring others. Their approach is intuitive, but it is not static. Lindsey allows their practice to absorb images and influences over time, retaining what remains useful and leaving behind what does not.
Recurring motifs are central to this process. Lindsey thinks of them as symbolic, though not always in a fixed or easily explained way. Some have identifiable origins; others emerge through aesthetic attraction and stay in the work long enough to take on significance. Rather than building a closed system of symbols, they develop a personal visual language that remains open to change and interpretation.
A consistent tension in their imagery is the meeting of what they describe as “the hallowed and the trashy.” Symbols or objects that appear sacred may be placed in unexpected contexts, while ordinary or discarded material can take on heightened importance. The work questions who gets to decide which images carry meaning, value, or divinity. Lindsey’s practice depends on collecting, revisiting, and recombining images, much as a magpie accumulates material without requiring every element to resolve into one answer.
Their influences are similarly wide-ranging. David Lynch, Nan Goldin, and Robert Mapplethorpe are recurring reference points. Lynch’s films first made a strong impression through their ability to construct a complete and unsettling aesthetic world, as well as through the force of their individual images. Goldin and Mapplethorpe represent different approaches to the human figure and portraiture: Goldin’s directness and tenderness, and Mapplethorpe’s combination of vulnerability, stylization, and formal control.
More recent encounters with Jenny Saville and Dorothea Tanning have also shaped Lindsey’s thinking. Saville’s blending of abstraction and realism has been important for its sense of physicality and movement, while Tanning’s strange, often disorienting spaces reinforce Lindsey’s interest in refusing overly settled visual realities. These influences are not treated as models to imitate. Instead, they become part of an expanding archive of images and methods that Lindsey adapts to their own practice.
Place has had a substantial effect on the work. Lindsey moved to Berlin a year ago and found that the new setting altered both their visual interests and the subjects they felt drawn to address. The architecture, atmosphere, clothing, and social environment of the city became part of their aesthetic vocabulary.
Returning to California during that period made the contrast more apparent. Lindsey felt that each place encouraged a different way of making and thinking. Over time, however, they began to understand that the work’s underlying concerns travel with them. Berlin and California remain distinct sources of visual and sensory information, but neither determines the practice on its own.
Their imagery also grows out of lived experience: social encounters, time with friends, walking, dancing, live music, and moments when emotion feels difficult to contain. Lindsey is especially attentive to the energy generated between people in shared spaces. These observations do not become straightforward documentation. They are worked through paint and collage until they become part of a broader, personal visual structure.
Lindsey sees art and life as inseparable. The work responds to what they are feeling, thinking about, and trying to understand in a given period. People, relationships, environments, and daily encounters all shape the images, just as making the work changes how those experiences are processed.
Asked what they hope to communicate through their work, Lindsey offers a concise answer: “I want to make people dance.” The statement is direct, but it also reflects the role of rhythm, energy, and bodily response in the practice.
Looking ahead, they are interested in collaboration with writers and musicians. Both forms have been important sources of inspiration, and Lindsey is drawn to the possibility of allowing an idea to move between visual, written, and musical states. They are particularly interested in collaborations rooted in existing relationships, where the process can carry the intimacy and trust of working with someone they know well.
