Can you tell us about your approach towards creating work?

Helen shares the sensory experiences of her materials and rural environment through her paintings. Stimulating viewers' curiosity by her subject matter, mark-making and titles, the artist has grown to highlight the urgency and complexities of our human responsibilities towards the environment, whilst maintaining hopefulness and joy in creation. Helen works from her studio in Dean Clough Mills, Halifax, West Yorkshire. She came to painting late in life having spent 40 years working as a nurse where she specialised in palliative care. Her ageing and life experiences have heightened her appreciation of nature and the precarity of life. There is an underlying sense of the sublime permeating her work which acknowledges the ambiguous situation in which we humans find ourselves, powerful but only to a degree. Research into working stone quarries gave focus for a series of paintings for her debut solo exhibition, Delving Deeply. Quarrying has shaped the rural and urban landscape and raises important questions about damage and conservation. Helen has been working through her thoughts and feelings whilst exploring the properties of her materials, paint, ink and collage on wood and canvas. Rocks and water have become recurring tropes as the artist’s inner world tussles with the external and the ongoing transformations in both. Future work will continue to explore the relationship between humans and nature, fired by a love of painting.

Can you tell us a bit more about the submitted work?

The message of Chance and Choices is that some events on our planet are not within our control but others such as what trees to plant or polluting activities, are within our power and we must make our decisions wisely.