mixed media on canvas/canvas dropsheet, 150x150cm
Helena is a regular exhibitor with the gallery and participated in the recent group show; TWELVE exhibition, featuring 12 contemporary women artists from the Sunshine Coast in late 2018, and she also contributed to our inaugural “New Beginnings” exhibition in December 2017 at Cool Art Picture Framing Gallery.
Below is her artist statement regarding some of her recent landscape studies.
“My practice is about ‘Place’. And in particular “Wild Places”.
My chosen “Wild Place” can be anywhere in the Australian landscape.
To study/connect with a place I initially work intensively ‘en plein air’ (outdoors on location).
This generally involves walking, listening, feeling, being present, surveying the location, collecting ……and then I start…by making marks.
What I look for are the forces at play that weave a “Wild Place”, the topography, geology, ecology, the movement of wind, water, weather patterns, history, and anthropogenic marks on the landscape.
My process then continues by taking my ‘en plein air’ work into the studio, where I translate my studies and memories into large scale abstract landscape paintings”.