“There is a meditative quality to Helen’s work, both in the way she works and the feeling you get as the viewer, looking inwards through layers of paint and pigment which tell a story of the parts of the world around us that often go unseen, yet are familiar in our subconscious memory”. Rhiannon Cottam, The Summerhouse Gallery
Multi-layered visual meditations in oil
“When I take a moment to observe something, like a wave or a budding rose, it opens and expands my awareness, leaving me with a sense of presence and gratitude”.
Helen Leaver's practice uses pentimento and palimpsest to explore the transience of circular time and memory. Her intuitively-led process unfolds through balancing cycles of spontaneous bursts of movement and pauses, moving between the conscious and unconscious, echoing a dance between daydreaming and being in the here and now.
Helen says, “My art practice is entwined with meditation, built to understand the many layers to my sensory experience and to process and express my emotions.
I am acutely sensitive to the unassuming and subtleties of form, patterns and colour in my environment.
My paintings are memories of memories, veils of oil paint patiently applied and eroded back, to-ing and fro-ing, searching for a space to belong, finding a deep appreciation of the present moment.
Painting from the sanctuary of my garden studio, I put aside initial observational drawings and allow the final image to reveal itself, feeling the connection with the part of me that has no beginning or end”.
As visual meditations, Helen’s paintings push and pull at the frayed edges of consciousness, offering the viewer a polite invitation to slow down, pause and cultivate awareness of the quiet place inside themselves.
BIO
West Country born, now based in mid Cornwall, Helen embarked on the intensive year-long St. Ives School of Painting ‘Porthmeor Programme 2023’ and has exhibited and sold work in solo and group exhibitions in St. Ives, Falmouth, Newquay and Truro. Her work is now in private collections throughout the UK, USA, Germany, Austria and New Zealand.
Helen is represented by The Summerhouse Gallery, Marazion, Cornwall.
