Helen Calder

Overview

New Zealand painter Helen Calder makes three-dimensional paintings that investigate the interface of painting and sculpture.

Her painting explores the limits of the medium offering a direct physical engagement with the materiality of paint, its weight, tactility and malleability and colour. These paint-skins, as she calls them, hang in space – free to flutter and move. Concern with colour, form and how painting operates in space when freed of its traditional support on canvas and stretcher is at the heart of Helen Calder’s practice.

The sensuousness of her objects is underpinned by a solid engagement with the history of abstraction. The work is tactile and intellectual – inward-looking and out-reaching at the same time. They speak to historic male hard edged geometric abstraction while at the time giving a sense of soft feminine craft, of fabric draping, of textural colour, with surprising juxtapositions and reveals between outer and inner, front and back.

The ‘freed’ paint objects have fronts, edges and backs and colour all the way through. They speak to historic male hard edged geometric abstraction while at the time giving a sense of soft feminine craft, of fabric draping, of textural colour, with surprising juxtapositions and reveals between outer and inner, front and back. Early works were monochromatic. Over the past few years, the colour palette has broadened and there’s greater depth, with paint built up through multiple colour layers of various opacities and folded to reveal the layers. The softness of the paint, its pliability and weight, is evident in the drape and fall of each folded form. Subtle textures in her surfaces are created through the use of conventional paint brushes and sponges to create on the poured skins.

She has also experimented with her supports – from rubber cords, to steel frames and rods – which present themselves as lines, none entirely straight, and some heading off at strange angles, but all an integral part of the work, interacting with the rectangular geometry of the paintings.

Bio

Based in Christchurch, Helen graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury in 2003. Her thesis on painting’s relationship with architecture has shaped her practice which sees architectural space as a frame for her work. Her work is held in private and public collections including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Christchurch Art Gallery, the Chartwell Collection, the Fletcher Trust Collection and Simpson Grierson Collection.
 
Recent exhibitions include Kaleidescope: Abstract Aotearoa, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2018, Qualia 760-620 λ, Enjoy Public Gallery, Wellington, 2014, Burster Flipper Wobbler Dripper Spinner Stacker Shaker Maker, curated by Justin Paton and Felicity Milburn, Christchurch Art Gallery, 2014; and Unpainted, Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin 2014.