Denerley catalogue

helen denerley

positive space

helen denerley

10 August - 7 September 2013

positive space

hunting dog (detail)

trying this and that, rejecting and settling, ruthlessly eradicating, then homing in, their eyes shining, focussed and inspired, like a hawk closing in on its prey. What artists are hunting for is what they have to say.

How can art say anything? Surely that’s just art-speak: a bubble of wishful thinking as bombastic and hollow as claiming that art is a thoughtful activity. Art is inert, dead. How can it be alert, and speak? But speaking is just what it does, in the minds of both the artist who makes it and the person who looks

Art is a thoughtful activity. This statement might seem contradictory: how can you both think and act at the same time? But that’s precisely what making art enables you to do. As they work, artists become increasingly alert, playing with their medium,

at it, across the spaces that separate people, transcending centuries and cultures. Though it’s the product of an age of motorways, Helen Denerley’s Horse could happily stand in a cave at Lascaux, snorting proudly at the paintings evoking its wild ancestors which pounded across the hills far above their creators’ heads. Art doesn’t just bridge physical and temporal distances; it calls even from beyond the chasm of death.

How can lifeless materials – dead wood, stone and metal, marks, scratches and paint, and in Helen Denerley’s case, pieces of scrap – speak to us? By magic. By being modelled in a mind that makes them appear to come to life. This vital, momentary melting pot is the elixir that goads artists on, in the hope that it will go on happening at their fingers’ ends time and again, each time more vividly than before. And that’s the elixir that makes us, the viewers, want to look at art again and again, and to live with it, a companion of animated space that makes us feel less alone.

How can space become animated? Isn’t it inert – an essentially negative, passive absence? I’ve watched Helen Denerley at work, her eyes like skewers, her fingers pincers, as she adjusts a piece of scrap so that the angle is precisely right, before she welds it into place. What she’s looking at, searching for, is not just the forms, the shapes, but the spaces which they leave, the unspoken volumes that they help to carve. Her sculptures are heavy, massive even, but they’re never solid, or set. They’re all air. That’s what gives them their liveliness,

tree - monoprint - 30cm x 16cm

and their look. The angles of a head, a limb, a wing, are always true to the animal in the fullness of its life, never in the grip of death. But it isn’t just a creature’s particular personality reaching out to us. Rather eerily, her sculptures themselves look. They look, and they see.

Eyes are the axis of her art. The stare of a cow, a dog or a bird provides her with an invisible beam to which all the movements in the animal’s form can be related. That’s why her sculptures are so alive and so light. They pivot around the sense of sight, nowhere more brilliantly than in Hen Harriers – the Food Pass, a masterpiece.

Who else would conceive of, let alone dare to make, a sculpture of one of the most remarkable aerobatic sights in nature – a male hen harrier warily dropping a vole into the claws of its much bigger, hungry, brooding mate, while both are in mid-flight?

Helen Denerley can rise to such a challenge because she’s a sculptor not of substance, but of absence. She sculpts the space between things, in this case between the male harrier eyeing his mate and his mate eyeing her food. Once she had the angle of those looks just right, everything else fell into place. Eyes are crucial to her art, because it deals not just with looks but with what is behind a look. Her skulls are hollow caves of consciousness. We are back to acts and thoughts.

Philosophy and religion attempt to make sense of the light in our eyes, the light that goes out when we die. So does art, but in a less ponderous way: it makes what is inert appear vital; it invites death to join a dance. This is the absence that Helen makes active, the emptiness that she fills with life. Of course her art is full of resonances – of her feelings about species loss, and the havoc we are wreaking on the world, as well as her own private grief. But her art comes before that; it’s a duel which she fights with her sense of emptiness. That’s why, for Helen Denerley, space has to be made positive.

Julian Spaldingwriter and former director of Glasgow

Museums

Hen Harrier Food Pass (detail)

‘Horse’ under construction in studio

horse head - ink and water colour - 15cm x 8cm

horse head 2charcoal on paper - 60cm x 42cmhorse study

monoprint - 30cm x 42cm

wading bird

kestrel

otter

sheep

kestrel

hen harrier

Dipper

‘Daisy’ in the studio

reflected otter

Pinned on the wall in front of my desk, is a quotation from the writer Isaac Babel. ‘No iron,’ it says, ‘can pierce the heart with such force as a full stop put in the right place.’

Both plea and directive, it asks for simplicity, for a sense of understanding the relationship between what might be and what is. Whether we work in words or in fire and metal, the decisions we make lie in balance as we try to tell whatever story there is to be told.

In her work, Helen tells complete stories, ones which move far beyond the physical forms of the creatures she creates, into the totality of their lives. If Helen’s hunting dogs are still, they’re holding their power, waiting until as one, they’ll take off, pursue. Her otter, momentarily terrestrial, will disappear if we turn away and slip back into its invisible, aqueous realm. Her birds know the air, fear and flight. They’re solitary or social, wary or bold. A group of magpies stops its earnest, concentrated chatter as we pass.

Every time I see a creature of Helen’s making, I think again about what gives it such rich life but know the answer is in her genius of discernment, her fine understanding of the positive and negative. It’s her knowing what to leave out that is, like the full stop in the right place, the iron that pierces the heart.

Esther Woolfsonwriter

magpies

hen harrier food pass

tree studyink on paper

Hen Harrier Studydrawing - 118cm x 84cm

pheasant

pigeon

horse studycharcoal on paper

60cm x 42cm

When I started work for this exhibition, my definition of ‘negative space’ was a purely artistic one. The gaps which occur naturally in a sculpture are as interesting as the metal itself, the eye seeing muscle and mass where there is only air.

As work progressed this ‘negative space’ became apparent all around me in music, poetry and relationships, both human and animal. Male and female hen harriers understand exactly how close they need to fly if they are to succeed in a food pass. For them the edge of danger is the point of success. There is a similarly edgy place in making sculpture and that is where an artist really creates.

Half way through making ‘horse’ I went to a mountain village in Spain where I have a friend with three horses. He agreed to let me draw them. He speaks no English and my Spanish is very bad. On our silent walk to the horses I wondered how close I as a stranger, with flapping sketch pad would be able to get without making them nervous. My Spanish friend knew exactly what to do and for an hour the space between myself, the horses and their owner was just right to let curiosity overcome nervousness. The tension of respectful distance between us all allowed me to draw what I needed to understand. Walking back to the village, I knew I had just had a perfect experience of ‘positive space’.

Artists often look back at a period of past work

and see clearly what influenced them at the time.

For this exhibition I have short cut that process and acknowledge the influence of my late partner Peter Welch. His attention to detail and understanding of how it is to be an artist have turned the empty space he has left into positive space.

Helen Denerley , June 2013

the old kilmorack churchby beauly, inverness-shire iv4 7al

+44 (0) 1463 783 230

[email protected]