Helen Kincaid
Drawing on the parallels between painting and our relationship to photographic images and processes, Helen Kincaid's work explores ideas around our anchorage on past and present, meaning and absence, fragmentation and erasure. She's interested in the increasingly elusive notion of a whole, of seeing the complete picture and the idea that we are only ever dealing with fragments, traces, disconnections and gaps, Helen works with images of soft furnishings, curtains, wallpaper, upholstery - elements that often boundary our interior spaces. She is interested in how their recesses, folds, and surfaces become psychological spaces, timeless micro landscapes, where perspective shifts and the figurative becomes abstracted.
The artist's process involves working with multiple images, cutting, tearing, folding, and reassembling the photographic fragments, looking for a collision of ill-fitting parts that might suggest transformation or new meaning, the familiar on the verge of becoming something else, what Blanchot described as 'unrevealed yet manifest'. Using a series of thin oil glazes the paintings are rendered with as little paint and as few brush marks as possible, reinforcing the idea of a fragile layer of pigment over a blank surface, just as in the construction of a photograph. This parallel with painting highlights for her an interesting contrast in scale between a physical thing and an idea - a literal and symbolic proximity of something and nothing.
Helen has been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2023 and the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2022. Selected exhibitions include Hopscotch at Beijing art gallery Bonian Space October 2024, John Moores Painting Prize, 2023 at The Walker Gallery Liverpool; Contemporary British Painting Prize at Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Studio Gallery, Gestura I at Marie Jose Gallery London and A Generous Space at Hastings Contemporary in 2022; the 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Delayed Rays of a Star at the Hardwick Gallery, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, 2018; CORRIDOR (Virtual Reality Installation) 2017 at INDEXprojects, Stroud, and DATA at The Contemporary Art Society, London.
In 2011 Helen was the winning artist of the SALON ART PRIZE at the Matt Roberts Art Project Space, London.
