Helen Hardess
Interdisciplinary visual artist
Helen lives and works on Jagera and Turrbal country. She acknowledges their lands were stolen, and sovereignty was never ceded.
Helen is an interdisciplinary visual artist, whose work is most often realised through installation. She works across audio, stop motion animation, welded and cast forms, found and discarded materials, and expanded drawing. Studio processes and field methodologies foreground the vital agencies of other-than-human worlds, in an interrogation of what it means to be living in a colonised country and in “the age of humans”.
With these concerns in mind, her practice takes two approaches. One approach is ecocritical commentary through irreverence, absurdity and playfulness.
The second focus relates to the Remapping Mitchell Arts Collective and Injune Arts Inc. Initiated in 2018, and based on the Maranoa River and region in Queensland, the creative project fosters connections with Indigenous knowledge keepers through ongoing residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and community engagement. The project is facilitated and co-directed by visual artists Jude Roberts and Vernessa Fien, and researcher and academic Dr Vicki Saunders.
Helen has shown work at BLINDSIDE (Naarm), Sydney University, the Old Lockup ARI Sunshine Coast, and Meanjin’s STABLE, Redland Art Gallery, Springhill Reservoir, House Conspiracy, and the POP, Webb and Project Galleries, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
She has a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Queensland College of Art (2022).
Selected Exhibitions
2022
entwined as others, The Old Lockup ARI, Maroochydore Qld. (duo)
2021
Mimesis, sympoiesis and the wee-loo, Sydney College of the Arts, Birds and Language Conference virtual gallery (duo)
Drawn, Redland Art Gallery, Brisbane (group)
2020
De-fence, Ins-scribe, Vacant Assembly, Brisbane (duo)
2019
Chain of Ponds, BLINDSIDE, Melbourne (duo)
2018
RONA18, Spring Hill Reservoirs, Brisbane (group)
Site, Sample, Sign: A Case Study, STABLE Artspace, Brisbane (group)
Etic Response, Whitebox Artspace, QCA (duo)
2017
Waltz in "Talisman", Webb Gallery, QCA (group)
Inside Outside In "[working title]", POP Gallery, Woolloongabba (group)
Foreign Matters in "Undergrowth", QCA Undergraduate Invitational Exhibition, Webb Gallery (group)
2015
Invitational Orientation Week Exhibition, Whitebox, QCA (group)
Residencies, Workshops, Publications, Podcasts
2022
A Positive Take on Negative Space, QUT Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice, School of Design,Visual Communication, (Co-presenter Tiana Jefferies)
2021
Stop Motion Erasure Animation, Redland Art Gallery (Co-presenter Natalie Wood)
Mark Making, Redland Art Gallery (Co-presenter Jude Roberts)
2017
“Cycle 12.” In The Conspirator, ed. Jonathan O’Brien, (Brisbane: House Conspiracy Inc., 2018), 168-83
House Conspiracy “Podcast #41: Helen Hardess and Jude Roberts.” Conducted by Jonathan O’Brien. In Conversation, 39:30
Academic
2022 Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours), QCA, Griffith University Award for Academic Excellence
2014-17 Griffith University Award for Academic Excellence
© Helen Hardess 2023 All rights reserved