Helen’s work explores landscape as place and experience. Her study of place is evocative, revealing the fragility of being - and she views this as an investigation into how we ‘fit’ - what has gone before, the evidence of life and how we crave to belong.'  The work is often framed within a context that brings home our own intimate connection with the outside space.

Spending many years as an artist printmaker Helen has exhibited and sold work in the UK and overseas. After becoming a resident artist at The 360° Trust in North Devon in 2010 where she began to teach printmaking. Subsequently, she set up and ran a printmaking studio in Ilfracombe where she taught printmaking courses in a larger studio allowing a wider variety of printmaking techniques. She now works from her own studio where she continues to practice and sell  her work and this has given more scope to investigate and revisit other disciplines.

She likes to progress her practice to a wider context  and has currently returned to experimenting with different disciplines other than printmaking including her heading an art collaboration with seven artists which began in April 2022. This collaboration allows each artist to explore different disciplines besides their own usual practice to find other ways of expression beyond their own comfort zone. 

Helen currently works with oil paint and mixed median which has many similarities to monoprint or monotype in printmaking and is drawn to the freedom of expression of the medium and the vibrancy of colour. It allows an intuitive response to the landscape and how she feels, remembers and ‘collects’ mental prompts about the forms, colour and value.

Her approach to her work is a matter of a collection of executive decisions which gradually draws out the salient elements.

‘Beginning a new work goes through an initial ‘brain dump’ about a place I’ve visited starting with an assemblage of paint, words and drawing. These ideas form the premise of the work which then goes through a further process of decisions of redacted parts or the whole, becoming layered again several times until a sense of the place begins to emerge’.