Dorothy Helyer – The Spaces Between

On a personal level, the transitory and fragile nature of life has been front of mind for me this year, after the sudden, accidental death of a dearly loved brother, and my own cancer diagnosis.
So perhaps it’s no wonder I see within my art practice an increased intensity in my exploration of the inevitable progress and cyclical nature of our time here.

This new development came in late 2022, during a week on Great Barrier Island. One afternoon we walked along Whangapoua beach,near the graves of some of the 130 people lost when the S.S.Wairarapa hit a reef at northern edge of the island in 1894.
We went into a forest area close to the forlorn little graveyard, where there were piles of dead leaves, each one extremely well preserved as a beautiful and delicate skeleton.
Fascinated by these, I gathered a dozen or so and since then their abstracted and digitised enlarged structures have played an important role in my paintings.

The paintings reveal themselves as I paint intuitively, and hints of impermanence, degeneration and decay find their way in.
The end-stages of the life cycle eventually lead on to new life but, in the everyday, there is also vibrant life running in parallel. Life goes on. Hence these paintings intuitively include bright spring-like elements, mid-season growth and autumnal maturity over the underlying, omnipresent metaphor of the skeletal structure that for me stands in as a modern-day equivalent of memento mori.
Dorothy Helyer
December 2023

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