Helen Blake, Battleships, oil on linen, laid on board, 48 x 60cm
Helen Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour, engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation guide the evolution of the work, her small, overtly hand-made paintings record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.
Andrew Wilson, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, has written of Blake's work that is underpinned by process - "always variously methodical and rational, yet also absurd and affected by the interruption of chance. In Blake's paintings, colour is deployed to follow a given order and yet these are paintings of nature ..... not the rigid order of an urban modernism, but the texture and rhythms, and immediacy of life unfolding".
As well four solo exhibitions at the Molesworth Gallery, Blake has shown at the RHA in FUTURES (2014), FUTURES Anthology (2015) and as part of 'In and of itself - Abstraction in the age of images' (2022). She was included in 'Generation 2022: New Irish Painting' at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, and received the Highly Commended runner-up award at the Contemporary Bristish Painting Prize (2022) from the almost 6,000 artists who submitted their work.