Helen Cockburn

 

Painter

Halesworth
Suffolk
United Kingdom

 My work is an attempt to create visual equivalents to the sensations evoked by music and poetry - in particular the almost magical power of particular words or phrases - and a reflection of my interest in historical objects and ancient places.  The precise nature of each work only becomes apparent during the physical process of making and the materials themselves often dictate the direction of each piece. My aim is always to provoke and stimulate the imagination by suggestion, enabling narratives and associations to arise intuitively rather than consciously.

I work mainly with found materials - wood, stone, string, paper and metal - built up in layers over a painted surface and then reworked with combinations of paint, pencil, pen and ink. The materials are collected from around my house and garden, from the street or beach and recycled from discarded work, old books and scraps of card and paper.  Over the past few years I have also used a formal grid structure which has endless permutations in terms of composition, colour and texture, particularly in its potential for variations in scale.  More recently my work has become more three-dimensional, breaking out of the grid into larger, more self-contained mixed media assemblages.

The gouache and collage works on paper are perhaps more illustrative.  The picture plane is divided into multiple sections using flatter, bolder colours with a cast of characters and the occasional hint of narrative.

 'It is signs which have no exact meaning that provoke a magic sense.' Miro