Helen Sear’s (b. 1955) photographic practice has developed from a fine art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980’s. Her photographs became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Her work is included in Face—The New Photographic Portrait (Thames & Hudson) and has been featured in several publications including Arts Review, Hotshoe, Guardian Review, Art Newspaper, Portfolio, Aperture and Arts Monthly amongst others. Her artworks are represented in several notable public and private collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Ernst & Young, British Council (Rome), Paul Wilson Collection and Virgin Communications Collection. In 2010 Helen Sear was awarded the prestigious Major Creative Wales Award and more recently, the National Eisteddford of Wales 2011 Gold Medal for Fine Art.

Artist Statement

From a series of landscapes and figures, two separate photographs are superimposed, the image behind appearing to float as a net or veil on the surface by a process of hand drawing/erasing in the computer. One photograph depicts the back of a head, the other a landscape both taken in different locations and reconstructed within a single image.

Neither able to be fixed as a complete picture, the partial erasure of one reveals an incomplete picture of the other. The figures and landscapes are taken in different geographic locations and the enmeshing of the two explores the possibility of being simultaneously in more than one place at any one time.

I have developed this approach of a double time of image making, one being the instant of the taking of the photographs, and the other their subsequent reconstruction through touch and the labour of the hand, signalling a return to a more primitive and bodily experience.

These photographs have evolved from previous explorations of the sublime to an engagement with both the retinal and the digital, where the 'hand drawn/erased' element becomes the interface between the formal clichés of both landscape and portraiture, particularly within the northern romantic tradition of painting.

In addition to her photographic practice, Helen Sear is Reader in Photography and Fine Art Practice at the University of Wales Newport.