Helen studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London. Her work has developed from a fine art education in performance, film and moving image video work in the 1980s. She started with installation art – making it immersive – where the viewer enters the artwork.
She is interested in the relationship between painting and photography.
Her recent work combines elements of the human and animal world with the natural world. She combines images to challenge the viewer’s perspective.
She has lived and worked in Wales since 1984 and became the 1st female artist to Be selected for a solo exhibition in Venice/ the seventh presentation of Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice, organised by the Arts Council for Wales. Helen is particularly inspired by the Welsh landscape.
Her work is often about the human relationship with the natural world.
Sear’s 2005 series ‘Inside the View’ is constructed in photoshop and consists of combined images of a portrait and a landscape. She creates a ‘lattice’ effect which allows the two images to be seen together – an example of the detail of this is shown below.
This creates an image with the feel of an ‘old master’. A mix between photography and painting. The viewer is drawn into the image – it is as if we are ‘seeing’ the landscape through the eyes of the (human) subject.
Her beyond the view series, whilst similar, presents the viewer with a different bias. The female figures are ‘behind’ the landscape image and feel out of reach of the viewer.
One of the pieces at ‘…. the rest is smoke’ at the Venice Biennale 2015 is a moving image in a beech wood with a figure appearing and disappearing at intervals whilst moving through the wood. The image conveys the transient nature of human life, here today and gone tomorrow. It was filmed over a whole year so also shows the different stages of the beech wood’s life. Sear calls it a ‘projection’ rather than a film and the flickering nature provokes memories of the early days of cinema.
It reminds me of a childhood game, statues, where a person (the curator) stands at the end of a room with their back to the ‘statues’ who have to try and tag the curator.
Whenever the Curator turns around, the Statues must freeze in position and not move for as long as the Curator looks at them. The Curator can even walk around the Statues. The Statues are free to move whenever the curator isn’t looking at them. As a viewer of the piece I feel as if I am the statue and the person who appears and disappears is the curator and I am trying to catch them.
References
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/content/helen-sear-–-behind-view
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