HELENA WADSLEY TRAGIC POET 2022 12 x 15” http://helenawadsley.com https://www.instagram.com/helenawadsley ARTIST BIO
PROJECT STATEMENT Tragic Poet is from my ongoing series Pillow Talk, which is comprised of mixed media works that combine hand dyed and stained fabrics, knitting, encaustic, and paint. Hybridity is the crux in breaking barriers in a post post- modern world whose visual language still depends on a modernist ethos. Bringing the formal qualities of abstract painting into textiles and their associated techniques creates a crossbreeding of intuition and savvy to pull at memory and the longing for creature comforts as well as intellectual stimulation and the adventure of experimentation. The repetitive gestures involved in knitting and sewing, I learned by observing my mother, provide solace during difficult times because of the way the processes invite the maker to go inward to find peace and enjoy solitude. I create these works in my search to understand what home means to me and where I might find it.
Helena Wadsley is a Vancouver-based artist whose practice involves textiles, drawing, painting, and video. Responding to the body as a site of feelings is the starting point to all her projects, whether based on research or intuitive processes. The body’s multifarious positioning as political and social loci as it travels across space and time is the primary site of research—how have our bodies been acted upon politically, and how we navigate the unspoken, language of our bodies’ reactions. Embracing the skills typically passed down through generations prompts a reconstruction of the definitions of inheritance, belonging, and identity. Her work considers knowledge systems such as science and literature to identify entrenched attitudes about gender that marginalize the ‘other’ while using craft techniques as a way of drawing traditional women’s labour into the vernacular of contemporary art. She has participated in residencies in Iceland, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Morocco, the Dominican Republic and the Yukon. Her work has been exhibited on five continents, and recently in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Orlando, the UK, Korea, Greece, and Canada. She has upcoming exhibitions in Athens and Vancouver this fall. She has been the recipient of Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants.
SILENT AUCTION OPENING BID = $300
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