About the Artist

Helen S Tiernan is a Canberra-based visual artist who majored in painting at the Australian National University (ANU) Canberra School of Art, graduating with honours in 2001. She has exhibited her work widely in the ACT as well as in Victoria and NSW. Helen's work is held in private collections, the ANU Loans Collection and the National Museum of Australia. Helen has received a number of awards and grants. Her work deals with historical and contemporary events and issues affecting Aboriginal people, particularly marginalisation and cultural retrieval.

Her focus has been on cross-cultural interactions and personal journeys, including titles such as Silent Generations, Songlines-journeys through Country and Shared Histories. Mark making and patination, embossed and applied, feature strongly in her works. They refer to familiar patterns recalling a domestic past as well as an Indigenous one. Her paintings interrogate, challenge and explore the many contradictions that lie below the surface of society. Other works explore concerns in relation to the validation of feminine experience and its transformation from craft to art and from the private to the public arena. Throughout each body of work she continues to indulge her fascination with exotic folds of fabric, drawing on the sensual surfaces of traditional seventeenth century Flemish and Edwardian artists and consulting the work of nineteenth century designer of wallpaper and textiles, William Morris. The idea of elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary by giving it cultural and conceptual meaning - from nature to culture - informs her overall approach.

Biography

© Helen S Tiernan
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