Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/07/2013 - 31/08/2013
All Day
Location
Oriel Wrecsam
Categories No Categories
Lure is a major solo show of new work by Helen Sear, one of Wales’ most important artists. Helen Sear’s art is characterized by her interest in the connections between photography and fine art, her focus on the natural world, and the arresting beauty of her work.
Helen Sear explores the act of looking, and relationships between nature, space and scale. From simple subjects – a frozen pond, straw bales stacked in a field, flowers – she makes artworks of great power. In Pastoral Monuments, humble wild flowers from a local meadow are elevated to epic status, the vivid colours glowing against a velvet-dark background with the richness of Dutch still life painting.
Distinctive to Helen Sear’s practice is how she conveys her ideas through different materials and artforms. Often starting from a single photograph, layers of meaning evolve through installation, film, sculpture and often back into photography. In her portrait series, Sightlines, bird ornaments obscure the subjects’ faces; although photographs, their backgrounds have been hand-painted with gesso, a traditional art material. The bird ornaments also form the basis of large sculptures, Plinths for Imaginary Birds, their smooth, polished surfaces bringing to mind the white marble commonly found in Classical and Renaissance sculpture.
Helen Sear lives and works in south Wales. She received a Major Creative Wales Award, Arts Council of Wales, in 2010 and was joint winner of the Gold Medal at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2011. She is Reader in Photography and Fine Art at the University of Newport.
A National Touring Exhibition curated by Oriel Davies and supported by Arts Council of Wales.
