Helen Wright

More signs of life
Bett Gallery Hobart
15 April to 11 May 2005

Helen Wright’s exhibition More signs of life at the Bett gallery Hobart included collage, print, drawing and painting, the full extent of her practice over two decades. Winner of the 2009 Burnie Print Prize (Australia’s second richest print prize) Wright is represented in the Australian National Gallery collection and that of most state collections with prints and drawings. She is particularly well known for her lithographs and subtle tonal pastel works on paper, but for the last five years she has been developing her painting in oil on linen.

Wright was insistent on developing a painting technique that matched this subtlety. As all painters know it takes time to develop the appropriate techniques to realise this kind of ambition. As a lithographer she was familiar with thin films of ink, something that had been significant in her embracing the digital print in the early 2000s. This formed the basis of her painting technique, which relies on thin layers of transparent oil paint, flat colour backgrounds and an economical use of brush stroke. 

Once she reached a point where she was happy to exhibit her painting she was no longer restricted by the paper sizes. This liberated her in the area of scale and it also overcame that problem of showing subtle work behind glass. In an earlier attempt to overcome this barrier problem she experimented with fixed pastel on paper glued to stretched canvas and presented as painting. This transitional phase was both liberating and frustrating. The eventual discarding of this direction was brought about because of the health issues related to the use of powerful fixative sprays and pastel dust. 

Because painting is half way between the directness of drawing straight onto a paper surface and the longer process of lithography or wood block printing she has found a happy medium with oil paints.  It was the use of brushes rather than the use of the hand that initially she found the most challenging aspect to achieving her goals in paint. But once she became familiar with the brush she realised the range and thickness of brushes enabled her to portray a detail in paint that had eluded her in the large-scale pastel work. She also responded to the wonderful depth of colour inherent in oil paint.

The work in the exhibition extends previous themes around animals and birds in Tasmania. Her project includes portraying every Tasmanian bird, which she has undertaken over a number of years and through a number of exhibitions. The genesis of this work can be seen in earlier exhibitions such as Survival of the cutest, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2005, and The Tower of song and other signs of life, Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra 2008 in which she explored domestic animals which were cute, cuddly and white. In the Bett Gallery show she has focused on both native and feral animals and birds, their habitats and the way they co exist in the local and sometimes specific environments. The motivation for this project was the fear of habitat destruction so familiar to all of us and in particular to Tasmanians at this time.

The images present aspects of both native and feral animals and birds such as rabbits, deer and pidgeons. The native birds include Honeyeaters, Pardalotes, Wattlebirds and Silver eyes. The images straddle the strange to the familiar, the portrait study, and the fantasy. Also included are established stories such as the willow pattern, and Arcadian country scenes represented in toile fabrics. An overriding feature is the mysterious stare of the creature back to the human. All the images celebrate her fascination and love for the natural world and our attempts to understand it.