This title is a celebration of a remarkable art practice. Over more than four decades, the work of the Tasmanian artist Helen Wright has shifted with ease, between intricately rendered drawings in pastel, charcoal, graphite and coloured pencil, to lithographs and woodcut prints, pearlescent watercolour and oil paintings, through to cast sculptures in resin, bronze and concrete. All reflect an uneasy tension and ambiguity between natural and human-made environments. The publication organises work into three distinct themes. SILENCE AND BEAUTY considers stillness not as absence, but as fullness and presence... The work opens a door into the emotional, feminine territory of energy, contained / smothered but engaged in a powerful struggle for fresh air and self-defining freedom. ORDER AND COLLAPSE addresses the ever-present tension between control and entropy... The work engages with a political and material world in chaos encompassing the disarray of a ‘freefall’. SOUND, FRAGILITY AND SURVIVAL explores what it means to persist or endure — to sing, listen, and create amid vulnerability and loss... The work looks outward with hope, engaging with this beguiling wonderworld with delight and amazement.
