Ink on Paper 2 (detail), ink on paper
Folded Drawing Series II (detail), ink & acrylic on canvas
Folded Drawing Series I (detail), ink & acrylic on canvas
Curtain, folded linen, 92cm x 62cm, £900
Document, folded calico, 114cm x 62cm, £1,100
Helen Cass
Helen was born in Ludlow in 1974. She studied at Herefordshire College of Art and Design for a year, and then took a fine art degree at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. She went on to take a PGCE in Art Education at the University of London, becoming a full-time art teacher for a year at King's School, Worcester in 1997. In 1998, she gained an MA with distinction at the School of Art, University of Wales, Aberystwyth funded by the British Academy. She is currently undertaking a practising PhD in Fine Art there. She has held solo exhibitions at Silk Top Hat Gallery in Ludlow, Bleddfa Art Centre, Worcester City Art Gallery and The Museum of Modern Art, Machynlleth. She has contributed to a number of Contemporary Art Society exhibitions in London including Art Futures as well as exhibiting in ART2001 and Fresh Art '03, both in London. Her commissions include two paintings for the head office of Calvin Klein, London.
I work in a systemic, process-based way, with line and repetition as my central concerns. In certain works the process is reduced to my hand repeatedly aiming to trace a perfectly straight line across a woven surface, a quasi-mechanical activity that is doomed to imperfection, creating a field of frission; noise; interference that is specifically autobiographic. Therefore the most systematic procedure is intimately expressive.
Like most reductive art my work involves a sense of time, in fact I often refer to them as time charts.
The intention of my work is to draw from the cyclical, repetitive structures of daily life, yet ''refrain from the dreary repetitions of habit towards the profound repetitions of memory''.
Helen Cass, 2007