Helene Black: 2009 :: The Strangeness of Natural Things

Diatopos Centre of Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus
Solo show
10 Nov 2009 – 30 Nov 2009

In the old days I had too much respect for nature.
I put myself in front of things and landscapes and let them alone.
No more of that, now I will intervene.  

Henri Michaux

Even if you flee to Cyprus you will find no rest. 

Isaiah 23/12

The strangeness of natural things by Helene Black is an exploration of earth colours from the Larnaca area.  The exhibition examines natural pigments where the past is not only deposited but its traces continue to establish a connection between art and nature. Black’s personal inquiry explores beyond the boundaries of topography. It concerns the investigation of  earth pigments and resonant sites interconnected to space.

We explore a space for  experiencing history.  Not so much as a means to discover how it was but to re-attach ourselves visually and emotionally to a real world which has meaning. Part of this reflection is the attempt to seize hold of sedimented memory in the present state, to seek and connect with the eternal now as embodied in a fragment of nature. This search for the invisible through the physical and historical, materializes in a web of open-ended, fragmentary narratives that speak to us of land, hands, actions and minds, all of them synchronized at a timeless moment. 

Within this experience of space as time, seeing significance in the simplest objects, implements, coloured earth and natural landscape, all combine into a symbolic blend of meaning resulting from the accumulative action and intervention upon our natural world by others throughout time. It is this notion, that Black focuses upon, which adopts the poetic inherent in all things and it is this very poetic essence and the conceptual potential for uncertainty that imparts a melancholic strangeness upon the land.