...the rest is smoke

… the rest is smoke

Helen Sear
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Venice

The title of Helen Sear’s exhibition is taken from an inscription in Mantegna’s last painting of St. Sebastian, now housed in the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice.

Ideas of mortality and temporality are explored through a new suite of related works looking at the countryside as a controlled environment and a locus of production and consumption. Landscapes marked and regulated by management are seen by the artist to exist simultaneously as magical spaces, imprinting themselves on both the body and mind of the viewer.

The body of St. Sebastian is absent in Sear’s reinterpretation of the late Mantegna. The sombre space of the painting is now an agricultural field planted with brilliant yellow rapeseed, close to her home in Wales. The arrows piercing the Saint have become the remains of the harvested crop, perforating and ultimately sacrificing the seamless skin of the photographic image.

Boundaries between figure and ground are explored both formally and poetically in the projection work.

The Company of Trees

“The company they offer is spatial, and it is a way of measuring, of counting.
Long before any numerals or mathematics, when human language was first naming the world, trees offered their measures - of distance, of height, of space… From them was born the idea of the pillar, the column…” John Berger

Cinematic and literary references collide in a phantasmagoria of visual intensity. The fusion of archetypal images from forest and fairytale is inseparable from the cut and pulse of the edit. Renouncing a linear narrative, The Company of Trees places the viewer in a zoetropic field of vision, reminiscent of early experiments with the materiality of film. This work is the result of a yearlong collection of moving images in a small beech wood in Monmouthshire, Wales.

The photographic and video works in the exhibition explore the image as sculptural form whereby the artist integrates different speeds of looking, contrasting physical scale and strong material presence. Each work resonates with another and, through deft and considered placement, with the architectural site of the exhibition.