2008 | Space and Place

A Retrospective

Lake Grace Art Space 10 - 24th May 2008

Anchored in the Northern Goldfields of Western Australia, Helen Seiver's work translates landscape as both physical and subjective space. While torn story book pages, found artefacts, text and oil paint are used as elusive fragments fundamental to her translation, the physical layering of the various components and elements is vital to the process.Artist Statement

The work endeavours to decode the values and ideals absorbed as a child of the 1950's while reading thrilling adventure stories of exploration and colonization. These stories maintained the distant gaze of the child reader, as the other, to that which was in reality invisible. Invisible to the child was the effect of colonization on Indigenous Australians dislocation from culture, language and land and genocide, and for the explorers and colonists themselves isolation, hardship and often death. Journeys to areas of historic mining settlements, now existing as no more than shards and scraps of lives once lived in the harshest of environments, have given a broader context in which to locate the lives of colonisers, in particular that of the women. The found artifacts are perhaps a more honest translation of the 'adventure' and space.

The work is also a private exploration of how to fit individual place and space into the shared histories of Australia .

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