Biography
The artist Helen Bullard works with animal subjects to question and uncover a changing landscape of research, theory and material exploration that deals with the animal-human question. Her research and installation works cross disciplines to explore languages and surrounding pidgins that might help present, question and reorder thoughts and perceptions towards psychology, anatomy, zoologies and linguistics in a visual, as well a written, tactile or spoken/audio form. In 2009, in conjunction with her solo installation show Animus flux, she organised the symposium Pidgin Language: Animals, Birds and Us which brought together a wide ranging delegation of speakers and participants to discuss animal subjects, both domestic and wild, in culture, science and the arts. Helen uses sound, film, sculpture, installation and painting as language tools that create curious frictions and synergies between the real and unreal, present and absent, living and dead, not quite real science, not quite wrong. Her hybrid offspring are the feral evolved!
All of her drawings and paintings are made directly from life outside in the environment, and she has been commissioned and funded to research and make work in Bulgaria, The Orkney Islands, Black Isle and The Fens. She has been exhibiting with The Society of Wildlife Artists, the Mall Galleries London, for several years.
Helen is also a sculptor and installation artist making work about animals, both wild and domestic. Her research leads her to work with a wide range of professionals and enthusiasts, including archaeologists, psychologists, museum curators, amateur naturalists, authors and other researchers.
Current research and interests revolve around language and communication between animals, including humans.
Helen Bullard is also Gallery Coordinator at Greyfriars Art Space, an artist-led non-profit initiative in King’s Lynn, and shadow committee member for The North Norfolk Exhibition Project.
PIDGIN LANGUAGE PANEL:
STEVE BAKER: Author of 'The Postmodern Animal' and Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire
ANDREA ROE: Artist and Lecturer in Sculpture, Edinburgh UK
RIKKE HANSEN: Writer, broadcaster and art critic
PROFESSOR NICKY CLAYTON: Professor of Comparative Cognition, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare College, dancer and contemporary dance choreographer
ROSEMARIE McGLDRICK: Artist and senior lecturer at Sir John Cass, London Metropolitan University.
GIOVANNI ALOI: Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, lecturer in Art History and Media Studies QMU and Tate Galleries, London.
HELEN BULLARD: Visual artist
'The ocean stretches out; endless body of undulating navy under purple topped hills and low slung cloud. A Great Northern Diver dives, and casts himself immaculate against the concrete of the Scapa Flow Barrier. A silver sky of stars splits across his oil slick back as he resurfaces, snowflake tattoos from his breeding grounds. Around us, roofless stone buildings relax back into the landscape from whence they came: the landscape of the loon.'
(Orkney, Spring 2008)
Please contact me for further information.