Focus °2 — HELENA GOREY

ISBN  978 0946846 733    48 pages (paperback)     20x17cm     37 illus

This book explores the rich but subtle complexities beneath Helena Gorey’s nature-inspired paintings. Catherine Marshall makes an analogy with Jane Austen who, while seemingly drawing her inspiration from a small, enclosed environment, manages to reveal endless explosive qualities existing within it. Gorey’s abstract style, the tensions she creates, her brushstroke and use of metaphor make for a very distinctive body of work.

EXTRACTS

"What should be said about Helena Gorey’s Blackcurrant Field paintings? Or, for that matter, about all or any of Helena Gorey’s paintings? At first sight they look like beautiful but obsessive variations on a theme, grid-like compositions often arranged in further grids, the geometry simultaneously seducing the viewer but enigmatically refusing to divulge its secrets. Perhaps the clues lie in a series of drawings she did in 1988 on a beach near Clifden, and exhibited as The Windy Drawings in Kilkenny a year later.
          In this series, what appear to be little more than scribblings are, in fact, drawings that attempt to give visual form to the wind that guided her hand as she worked and that her eye read in a billowing clothesline nearby. To say she is concerned with nature is something that can be said with equal veracity of many artists, but what precisely does it mean in relation to this one? What The Windy Drawings reveal is an attempt to find a visual expression for the scientific laws governing the movement of the wind, and the ways in which those laws are constantly transgressed yet endlessly repeated and restated. The whole of empirical science is based on the belief that nature behaves according to a rigorous set of laws, yet not even the most hardened scientist would deny the tremendous variation that is to be found within that order. Helena Gorey’s drawings and paintings strive to give voice to those opposing forces. According to the narrator in an early short story by John McGahern, the continuance of sexuality is because the penis has no memory. In other words, there is a constant need to re-enact the same rituals, yet the individual experience is constantly different. Reawakening the wonder of that ever-new yet familiar experience is what Helena Gorey’s Blackcurrant Field paintings are about. Ultimately they are about creativity itself."

— from the essay by Catherine Marshall