ABOUT

  • Working from her studio in West Wales, Helen Booth makes paintings and works on paper shaped by repetition, erasure, and...

    Working from her studio in West Wales, Helen Booth makes paintings and works on paper shaped by repetition, erasure, and time. Her practice has been recognised with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award for Painting and the Pollock-Krasner Award, and her work is held in private collections internationally.

     

    Original works are available to collect.
    Commissions are undertaken selectively.

     

    ARTIST STATEMENT

    My work is shaped through repetition, erasure, and small, deliberate gestures. Each painting develops slowly as layers are built, removed, and reworked, allowing the surface to reveal its own history. Over time, my practice has become one of reduction, discovering how the simplest marks can hold the greatest presence.
     
    My earlier work explored impermanence through ephemeral paintings made with earth, sand, and the effects of weather. Although the materials have changed, that way of working remains central. In the studio, I continue to build and dismantle surfaces, letting gravity, time, and the physical behaviour of the materials become part of the process. Nothing is fixed too quickly; each painting emerges through sustained attention.
     
    Dots and lines appear again and again, not as symbols but as gentle acts of accumulation. They create rhythms across the surface, moments of density and stillness, inviting the eye to move, pause, and return. The palette remains restrained, centred on whites and subtle pushed-back colours, allowing the texture and light to become more apparent.
     
    Rather than seeking certainty, the work exists in the space between intention and chance, order and erosion, order and chaos. It is through these small, repeated actions that each painting finds its own quiet balance.

  • SKAFTAFELL GLACIER - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

    In 2020, Helen undertook a residency at Skaftafell Glacier in Iceland, an experience that left a lasting mark on her relationship to scale, silence, and material presence.

     

    "I remember walking through 1 metre deep snow - the sound of my heavy body making a repetitive dull hum that was swallowed immediately by the quiet.

    Everywhere was white - I was surrounded by the most sublime vista. I couldn't quite grasp what I was feeling. It felt like every atom was vibrating at the same frequency.

    I turned a corner and there she lay - Nature in all her divine glory - laid bare, menacing, beautiful and deadly present".

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