Helen Booth

I am greatly inspired by the idea of time and change, visualising memories as web-like gossamer threads drifting in our subconscious. This fragility and tenuousness is captured in my work by the layering and re-working of paint, building up a history of marks in order to create images that are abstract and contemplative.
I grew up on the edge of the Derbyshire Dales , in the Midlands , but I also cherish childhood memories of the landscape of north Wales. The seasons came and went, yet I was aware that beneath the superficial colour changes and man’s efforts at husbandry was a fundamental and eternal structure. I can still see five dense stripes of woodland on a hill in Wales; the trees were left like some ritual scarring on her skin. These markings are typical of a recurring archetype within my work. I find the contrast between the immensity of the landscape and the brevity of the human life-span both humbling and exhilarating.
If you look at my paintings closely you will see layer upon layer of paint. Each piece takes time to complete: although the marks are expressive and impulsive, the building up and stripping back demands time and consideration. My prints on the other hand are far more instantaneous. I love the immediacy of the medium, the way in which I can create atmospheres using one colour and manipulating the inks on the plates. Painting and printing are very different, but in my work each form vitally complements the other.
I am inspired by the poems of T.S.Eliot, particularly ‘The Hollow Men’. He seems to suggest that if we do not question and tap into our origins, we become empty - ‘headpiece filled with straw’ - like scarecrows, standing alone in a field, unfeeling. Eliot’s words offer me hope and encouragement: we can be enriched by our perceptions and experience and intuition.
The colour black figures heavily throughout my paintings and prints. Whether it is a heavily worked painted brush-stroke or a fine graphite line, it tends to dominate; like a calligraphic mark. These are inherent markings, in the way that punctuation is inherent to a written page. The line changes and metamorphosis’s; It can be so delicate that it is hardly visible, veiled under layers of paint and washes, or it can be pulsing in the foreground, reminding me that change is our only constant.

Review:

Helen Booth’s work haunts the observer with a meditativeness that teeters on the edge of the void. Beauty resonates and pervades, but there’s melancholy in the cool colours, a sense of alienation between the points of light and dark burrs. What’s special is her assured rhythms and her unsentimentality, but
it is the spontaneity of those ubiquitous motile threads that pulls us back from the brink and balances the work with such rare, ludic and dramatic promise.

Elizabeth Ashworth
May 2005.

Recent Exhibitions:

Galanthus Gallery: Wormbridge, Hereford. Feb 06
Zurich International Art Exhibition. Zurich. Oct 05
Project30 New York. Oct 05