HELEN GEIER

Her northern sketches are sparked by flashes of mountain escarpments or stacked rock formations seen through a car window, or the recollected shock of encountering termite mounds rising like gravestones from yellowed grasslands. The stillness of nature is embodied within the artist’s concentration as she records linear designs on fallen sandstone or the negative spaces created by river landforms. There is an appreciation of the minimal within the landscape as well as visual and conceptual density. (Laura Murray Cree, catalogue essay, “The Fold”, August 2010.)

Helen Geier’s career covers solo and group exhibitions from 1972 and includes two major 30-year surveys Different Fields of Vision (graphic work, Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore, 1999) and Dissolving View (paintings and works on paper, Canberra Museum and Gallery, 2000).

Born in Sydney in 1946, Helen studied there before traveling to London where she taught at a variety of institutions and completed post-graduate studies at the St Martin’s School of Art (1973). In 1998 she received a Master’s degree from RMIT University, Melbourne. From 1981 to 1994, Helen taught at the Canberra School of Art. She now works full time at her art practice.

Helen’s work has been included in curated group exhibitions and the Melbourne International Art Fair. She has had solo exhibitions overseas, including in Vienna, New Delhi (later toured India), Singapore and Auckland, and in all States and Territories in Australia.

Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, most State Galleries, many regional, corporate and institutional collections and numerous private collections in Australia and overseas.

This exhibition will also include the Melbourne launch of “The Fold”, a limited edition portfolio of 6 etchings based on Central Australian images.

The Fold comprises six photo-etchings generated from photographic details of several folded and incised works on paper conceived in 2007 as sculptural articulations of the weathered ranges and gorges of the Central Australian desert. Helen was interested in the shadows they cast and the ancient patterns of nature concealed within them.

The photo-etchings made in 2009 at Basil Hall Editions in Darwin after time spent in Litchfield and Kakadu National Parks, also suggest human presence in the ashes of burnt landscapes, notations of a setting sun and the intrusion, in several works, of finely drawn geometric constructions floating incongruously above a timeless landscape. (Catalogue essay, Laura Murray Cree, February 2010.)