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. Engaged with material agencies she works with 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”.
Her practice has two main approaches. One approach is ecocritical commentary which particularly favours tones of irreverence, absurdity and playfulness to talk about serious environmental/climate matters.
The second focus is on the Yimbaya Maranoa Arts Collective. Initiated in 2018, and based on the Maranoa River (Queensland), Yimbaya is a First Nations led immersive arts project engaging Gunggari and Maranoa region artists and creatives, and visiting artists.
Residencies are located where sites of significance to the Gunggari participants intersect with the route taken by surveyor-general Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, who in 1846 meticulously and extensively diarised his experiences.
The project's outcomes have formed a series of exhibitions, workshops, symposium presentations, collaborative actions, and community engagements. A steadily accumulating digital and material archive platforms stories and perspectives less visible and heard, moving towards a decolonisation of Maranoa cartographies. Critically, the project has a relational ethos, holding space for deep listening, inter-cultural exchange, the reparative and the regenerative.
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, Grey Street, and Project Galleries, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
She has a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Queensland College of Art (2022).
© Helen Hardess 2025 All rights reserved
Select Exhibitions
2024
Yimbaya Maranoa, Injune Creek Gallery, Injune, Qld (group)
2023
Yimbaya Maranoa, Mitchell On Maranoa Gallery, Mitchell Qld. (group)
2022
entwined as others, The Old Lockup ARI, Maroochydore Qld. (duo)
"Curiouser and curiouser", cried Alice, Grey Street Gallery, QCA Griffith University. In completion of BA Visual Art Honours degree
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, In-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
Residencies, Symposiums, Workshops, Publications, Podcasts
2024
Residency (5-day): Yimbaya Arts Collective, Terrarara Station, Forestvale Qld
Panelist - Yimbaya Maranoa: Creating resonant echoes from Country, ISEA 2024 (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) Academic Program
2023
Residency (4-day): Yimbaya Maranoa Arts Collective (formerly Remapping Mitchell Arts Collective), Mount Moffatt Qld
Panelist -Yimbaya Maranoa: Creating resonant echoes from Country, More-than-human Maker Symposium, QUT Sustainability Week 2023
2022
A Positive Take on Negative Space Workshop, QUT Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice, School of Design,Visual Communication, (Co-presenter Tiana Jefferies)
2021
Stop Motion Erasure Animation Workshop, Redland Art Gallery (Co-presenter with Natalie Wood)
Mark Making Workshop, Redland Art Gallery (Co-presenter Jude Roberts)
2017
Residency/publication/podcast: “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