Helen Sear
b. 1955, England
Lives and works in Gwent, Wales
Helen Sear’s photographic practice has developed from a Fine Art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980’s. She continues to explore ideas of vision, touch, and the representation of the nature of experience, combining drawing, lens based media and digital technologies.
Helen's photographic work prompts instinctive gut emotions from the viewer: fear, desire, entrapment, joy. Her rich and sensual imagery is carefully selected and manipulated to evoke complex and often indefinable or unfinished responses, as if we are being presented with a pictorial fragment of a tale. The work has a visceral and sensual quality. Throughout Sear’s practice is an ongoing enquiry into beauty and nostalgia, ranging from the grand opulence of Italian interiors or a rural vista, to abandoned detritus in a wooded glade or a forgotten ornament.
Her photographs became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Her work was included in the exhibition About Face at the Hayward Gallery London in summer 2004 and La Mirada Reflexiva at the Espai D’Art Contemporani in Castellon Spain in 2005. A 90-page monograph Twice, was published by Zelda Cheatle Press in 2002, and Grounded was a touring exhibition curated by Impressions Gallery York between 2003 and 2005. Recent exhibitions include Inside The View, shown at Gallery Harmonia in Finland in 2006 and Klompching Gallery New York in 2009. Produced by g39, Tale is a photo essay comprising a selection of works selected from Sear’s practice from 1992 to present day. It includes an accompanying narrative text written by David Chandler, director of Photoworks in Brighton. Helen is currently Reader in Photography and Fine Art Practice and a member of the European Centre for Photographic Research at the University of Wales Newport.
The artist was in the following exhibitions:
Helen Sear
The Golden Record
Portmanteau
This artist is featured in:
Tale
Links :
http://www.axisweb.org/seCVWK.aspx?ARTISTID=1420 http://www.klompching.com/
