Helen Glassford

Helen trained at the Duncan Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, leaving with a Masters Degree in Fine Art in 2002. Her studio is now in Dundee from where she walks and climbs in the Scottish hills, loving the experience of moor-and-mountain solitude, a sense of the sublime, the moods and vastness of the landscape.

She finds no satisfaction in attempting to portray a singular viewpoint, aware that the mind’s eye does not settle easily that way, preferring instead to try to convey something of the things she saw and how they made her feel, in a manner that accepts the fleeting fluidity of perception. It is as if she wants to distil the journey, so that drip by drip, brushstroke by brushstroke, the jumble of sensory impressions that a day in the wilderness so gently imprints on the psyche, is sorted and catalogued into layers of oil and pigment. In some works the shape of the land is evident, in some less so, and in others almost not there at all, almost as if it was not seen or fully remembered, or even discarded as not relevant. In some, colour is naturalistic, while in others the viewer might be confounded by a block of blue, a slash of indigo, a zig-zag of green, or a swathe of golden ochre, hinting at a sensation more keenly laid down.

These things are not simply bravura gesture or visual punctuation, but snippets of evidence – stuttering, imperfect glimpses and traces of something felt viscerally, but already fading in the memory. Paint is applied and removed, assessed and re-assessed, images emerging out of the murk of imperfect recall. What is left is quiddity, essence, something to be recognised as verity, or as close as it is possible to get, and the artist moves on, to the next thing.