Helen Ballardie

In her paintings Helen Ballardie explores ideas around identity and perception, truth and fiction. She displaces characters from their usual environments and transposes them into new ones, and constructs ‘memories’ from a variety of disparate images.

The duplicated character that features in this painting from her Half Things series is from the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Peter Lely’s ‘A Boy as a Shepherd’. To the artist he seems not only to be posing as a shepherd but, for that time, to be mentally living as one, and therefore perhaps depicting some sort of truth. Helen has always been interested in the power of dressing up and how it affects one’s being. She uses the boy pretending to be a shepherd to represent some polished and exaggerated ‘memories’ in some other scenarios.

Helen maps out her ideas on each canvas using oil for its versatility but also uses a variety of other mediums including Inks, Household Paint, Felt Tip Pen, Pencil, Acrylics, Oils and Collage.

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.