London-based Helen Barff is one of a young generation of British artists working quietly and thoughtfully without media fanfare. Her work extends across a range of practices, encompassing sculpture, photography and mixed media constructions. To all these activities Helen brings a lightness of touch and an acuity of vision grounded in the discipline of drawing, for which she qualified with a distinction from Camberwell College MA programme.
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Whether rendering in charcoal the random folds of a humble black bin-liner, creating ghostly photograms from detritus dredged from the River Thames, or turning the interior of a train compartment into a camera obscura to record the traces of ambient light and motion within, Helen’s work is consistently inventive and exploratory. She is fascinated by the social lives of objects and has a sensitive eye for the myriad ways in which artefacts can occasionally take on appearances that seem to bely their true nature. Above all, she is interested in how light falls on objects, how it reveals or distorts the contours of three-dimensional forms, how when mediated by chemical processes it can be made to hint at the underlying structure of things.
Thus a simple mechanical steel cog found on farmland, when wrapped in white felt mimics the form of some primal mollusc; anonymous domestic objects rescued from the riverbed adopt the bleached appearance of prehistoric bones; while a car’s steering wheel and gear-stick, when exposed through a pinhole camera, reveal rarely recognised sculptural attributes.
The ‘Upside-down Harbour’ collages depict Barff’s award winning site-specific installation featuring upturned boats on a tidal foreshore with their chains and anchors rising skyward rather than hanging in the water below the vessels. At low-tide the whole installation is visible, and at high-tide just the anchors appear above the water. In 2008 she won the Arts Council Award for the installation, which was exhibited at London’s annual Deptford X festival. The ‘Pinhole Camera 1 Hour 25 Minute Train Journey’ images were created by a pinhole camera on board a train. The camera was fixed to the train table, then exposed for the duration of the 1 hour 25 minute journey. The artist repeated the journey several times getting a different result each time.
After graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art and Art History at Goldmsiths College in 1999, Helen went on to win a distinction in drawing at Camberwell. Since then she has exhibited widely in group and solo shows and currently teaches drawing at Kent Institute of Art and Design. She was recently featured in Chris Townsend’s book New Art from London (Thames & Hudson, 2006).