Helen Sear

Biography

Helen Sear was born in Banbury, England in 1955. Her career as a Fine Artist came to prominence through the 1980s, when she worked primarily through installation, performance and film. Her photographic works became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Her work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including John Hansard Gallery Southampton (1994), Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London and Portfolio Gallery Edinburgh (1996); Zinc Gallery Stockholm (1999); Anderson O'Day Gallery London (2001); Impressions Gallery, York and Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2003); and Klompching Gallery, New York (2010).

Solo publications include Twice (Zelda Cheatle Press, 2002) and Tale (G39, 2009). Her work was featured in Face: The New Photographic Portrait 2005 and the recent Land Matters by Liz Wells (2011). She is represented in many public and private collections, including The British Council, The Welsh and English Arts Councils, The Department of Trade and Industry, Paul Wilson, Manfred Heiting, Readers Digest, Unilever, Ernst and Young, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Aperture Foundation, New York.

Helen lives and works in Wales, is currently Reader in Photography and Fine Art Practice at the University of Wales Newport, and was the joint first prize-winner for visual art at the national Eisteddfod Wales (2011). She is represented by Klompching Gallery New York and a book of her work will be published by Ffotogallery Wales in 2012.

For more information, visit Helen Sear's website here

Artist Statement

Bringing the body into the act of looking. In both series of work Inside The View and Beyond The View the enmeshment of two photographs through a hand drawn line collapses the traditional distance in photography between the viewer and the view/figure and ground, and extends the idea of the photographic moment. It brings the image close to the surface of the eye. The word for retina in German is Netzhaut, which is also a net or a trap. The marks Sear makes whilst erasing are similar to the construction of lace or crochet associated with handicraft, or hand drawn lines imitating the visual noise of the computer screen itself. One half of the image is erased to partially reveal the other, neither able to be seen in their entirety. The artist is working in a montage tradition, but the intervention and touch between images is more of a caress than the cut associated with collage. Sear wants the elements of her images to be inseparable.