Helen Glassford (b1976)

Helen is a painter living in North East Fife, Scotland. She studied painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. She is a professional member of the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolour and Visual Arts Scotland. Her work is in many private collections worldwide and in the public collection of the McManus Art Gallery and Museum Scotland.

Helen’s immersive landscape paintings inhabit a delicate threshold between the natural world and interior sensation, constructing palpable, atmospheric spaces that are simultaneously intimate and boundless. Grounded in sensory observation of light and the flux and flow of the seasons, Glassford distills her experience of northern landscapes through the twin filters of memory and imagination.

Themes of longing, belonging, wildness and resilience weave through the surfaces of her work whilst echoing a personal attunement to the natural world.

She is drawn to these edge lands and borders in life. The thin line between visibility and obscurity, the sodden moorland fringes, the crystal clear, calm waters edge, where the sky rests upon the hazy horizon, the fudge between madness and sanity, between danger and safety are places explored through the addition and subtraction of oil paint. Abstraction and figuration come and go as interior and exterior worlds infuse and entwine.

Her process relies on subtle, translucent glazes and energetic, intuitive mark-making to convey the shifting light, weather, and quiet drama of remote, rugged coastal and mountainous terrain. Glassford evokes profound glimpses into the deep resonance and understanding of place whilst revealing and bringing to life new worlds and new possibilities.