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 overtly hand-made paintings record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.
Andrew Wilson, former 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 award at the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2022) . Her work has been acquired by the Arts Council of Ireland and by the OPW for the State Collection.
