HelenA Pritchard - The Homeless Mind

About

A two-part exhibition, it was first installed at City Racing, a former Methodist chapel in the agricultural town of Bishops Castle, Shropshire, before transferring to the gallery in London. Much of Helen’s work explores dualities, she utilises discarded waste and excess materials of industrial processes in which she sees value, often applying to them processes such as gilding and elevating them formally. So too there is a duality between presenting the same work in two contexts, and her working in two locations from her studio in Brixton, a busy urban hub, and rural Shropshire.

The title 'The Homeless Mind' is taken from the book by Peter L. Berger which looks at the role of modernisation and the decline in our mental capacity for decisions and opinions through the over-exposure of technology. The work in the exhibition echoes this feeling of the mind being transported elsewhere, and the power of the natural world to do this, and the duality of existing alongside the physicality of materials and bodies in space. Most strikingly we encounter three towering 'Block Heads', monolithic forms of her scaled-up maquettes and made from offcuts and waste products from building sites, repurposed into looming figures. As you walk among their massive forms, which fill the space and reach almost the entire height of the gallery, there is a sense of the unexpected encounter, overpowering, even the claustrophobic. The stone-like forms also ask questions as to where they have come from and how did they come to exist, a human intervention, but derived from where? Visually the material and scale imply the heavy and monumental, but the reality is rooted in the everyday and functional, elevated to greatness, generating a certain tension in the space.

In the second room of the gallery we encounter the maquettes themselves. Again using the discarded and everyday, Helen employs materials that have a connection and value to her, that are cultural signifiers. Her language is formal, and refers to her background as a painter, with an emphasis on colour and abstract characteristics. Bands of primary colours and grids at closer inspection reveal themselves to be hessian panels stained with ink, framed with offcuts of wood burnished in bole and gilding, or packaging from luxury goods to fireworks and food. All are artefacts and indicative of our cultural history. “I do not wish to describe something literally, I wish to present questionable feelings and strange observations.”

There is a subversive humour in the work, laughing at our chaos and waste through the incorporation of everyday discarded objects - a toothbrush, chopsticks, nails, paintbrushes, cigarettes - ready-made objects that give the anthropomorphic forms character and mannerisms.  “Using waste materials, off-cuts and excesses of what is around is indicative to our environment. The work is an investigation modern materials and their reference and connectivity to art history, an exploration of aesthetics of daily life and domesticity. I am finding connections through formalism, absurdity, domesticity, art history and commerce. Taking something of no value and giving thought to process by gilding, bronze casting, framing, transforming and rescaling. These opposing principles are about creating balance, a concept of aesthetic beauty which can come from nothing/ junk. The dualities within my work can be metaphoric or present. Giving form to the idea and finding a balance between materiality and meaning; this connectivity is part of creating a compositional balance, where all parts must be held together in tension”