Helen Hardess
The artist acknowledges a white settler heritage, and that she lives and works on Jagera and Turrbul country. Their lands were stolen, and sovereignty was never ceded.
Helen Hardess (she/her) is a Meanjin based multidisciplinary artist, whose work is most often realised through installation. She works across audio, stop motion animation, welded and cast forms, found and waste materials, and expanded drawing. Studio 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 and playfulness. The second focus is participation in an ongoing re-mapping and re-storying project based around the Maranoa River, Queensland. Initiated in 2017, the community-based project is co-directed by visual artist Jude Roberts and Gunggari artist and academic Dr Vicki Saunders. There is a further iteration of this project planned for 2023-24.
Helen’s work has been shown in BLINDSIDE (Naarm), Sydney University, and Meanjin’s STABLE, Redland Art Gallery, Springhill Reservoir, House Conspiracy, and POP, Webb and Project Galleries, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
She has a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Queensland College of Art (2022).
© Helen Hardess 2017-2022. All rights reserved
Exhibitions
2022
entwined as others, The Old Lockup ARI, Maroochydore. (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
2014-17 Griffith University Award for Academic Excellence