Helen Glassford (b1976)
Helen Glassford (b1976) is a painter living in North East Fife, Scotland. She studied painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Dundee. She is a professional member of the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolour and Visual Arts Scotland. Her work is in many private collections world-wide and in the public collection of the McManus Art Gallery and Museum Scotland.
Helen's oil paintings draw on her memory, experience and observation of the remote areas of Scotland. She seeks out the atmosphere, the intangible and unseen through her expressive land and mindscapes. Constructing full environments, a visual echo of experience, connecting the wild with the past and present and connecting the intimate with the vast. Always touching upon human relationship with nature the multi layering of the senses is in constant flux within the surface of her work. Serenity, melancholy, the sublime, remoteness, absence, and belonging soak in through the surfaces. They are places without names, but often looking to the North. Shaping space with simple washes and minimal brushwork in places suggesting movement or at other times building layers slowly and surely with pigment and glazes to reflect time passing. Overlapping folds and seams, paint poured wet into wet revealing marks and edges, lifted and reapplied with rags, brushes, large squeegees. An echo of the effects of weather and light in the North. Most are transitional spaces where reality is not demanded but also not ignored.
Her work is about these spaces, edges 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.
Paint is explored and celebrated whilst making sense of her environments, both external and internal.
There are many underlying currents to Glassford's work spanning areas such as climate concerns, poetry and writing, longing and belonging, complexity theory, natural systems, personal references and art history. All off which offer profound connections for the way she thinks about the world.
