Helen Ballardie’s paintings explore ideas concerning truth, fiction, perception, and identity. In this series of paintings, The Gossips, the figures depicted are playing a game of Blind Man’s Buff but they have been taken out of their original contexts, rearranged, and made to look as if they are doing something different. Helen has long found inspiration from figures in an engraving of Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) titled Blind Man’s Buff.

Helen studied Fine Art Painting at the Kent Institute of Art & Design, (Canterbury College of Art). She was artist in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company & won the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Open Exhibition in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Germany, Belgium, Italy, France and the UK, and is held in private collections in Europe, UK, and USA.

This work was one of a series of paintings by Helen Ballardie that appeared in the BBC Drama The Split.