Featured work: ‘Slow Water’

9 March – 12 June 2021

Oriel Myrddin Gallery are delighted to present the solo exhibition 

B R E A T H E by West Wales based artist Helen Booth this coming January 2021. 

The majority of work in this exhibition will be a direct response to Helens residency at Hafnarborg Arts and Culture Centre in Iceland earlier this year. Witnessing what Helen describes as a ‘Divine landscape’, these works will interpret Nature in its purist form using the limitless variations of the single dot. 

These recent paintings concentrate on the single dot. Often following disjointed lines, the way in which they crowd together in amorphous blocks or destroyed by gravity by the dripping of paint. The works explore both an impulsive and repetitive way of mark making that is both gestural and meditative - straight and dynamic lines often appear alongside the more delicately translucent marks. The dots in Helen's work can represent many different concepts - air trapped in ice or falling snow. It can be the end of a sentence or a punctuation in a landscape. A symbol of life and a representation of death – a full stop.

The loosely applied paint is equally as emotional a response to the process of painting, as is the restrained colour palette, creating work that focuses on the mark and texture without the distraction of colour. This way of working is fundamental in striving to capture our emotions and responses to life, landscapes, and the elements that are thrown at us. 

Agnes Martin stated succinctly in her Beauty is a Mystery of Life lecture in 1989 that “it is commonly thought that everything that is, can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work”.