Helen O'Donnell

www.helenodonnell.com
helenesther@hotmail.com
http://twinvixenpress.blogspot.com/

Artist's Statement


Helen's work is deeply inspired by the natural environments that surround the beautiful places where she has lived. Having grown up on the coast of Maine, the spaces where the land meets the sea and where the sea meets the sky, are inspiring wavering horizons. The enormous mountains of the Pacific Northwest are dynamic and implausible. The buildings, roads, and hillsides of Italy and the green pastures and raging brooks of Vermont are astonishingly beautiful. These places are creative platforms for the imagination, a jumping off place into the unseen and unknown.

In all of these places, Helen has gardened, working with her hands in the earth, witnessing the seasonal life cycles of her environment. Helen is interested in the shapes and forms that each plant takes, as it pokes its head from the wet cold spring earth to the dried and faded seed head bending in the fall wind. Her fascination with these changes in form, come across in the movement and energy of her broad shapes and scratchy lines that make up her imagery.

Helen begins by making abstract lines and shapes that arise intuitively from her working and living experiences. By layering plates and printing them in different colors, the abstract lines and shapes begin to take form and sit in a landscape. The resulting landscapes are cinematic and anthropomorphic, challenging the viewer to re-imagine nature as a dynamic, energetic process, rather than a static and fixed entity. Her work lives and breathes on the horizon, between lightness and darkness, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown.