Helen O' Leary
Leitrim, Ireland and Jersey City, NJ
Website
HelenLeary.com
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
Catholic minimalism. The inventory and archeology of memoir, place, histories, big and small, are imbedded in my work. I knit with wood, bending the painting out of the ruin of its own making. Each piece is cobbled together from the detritus of earlier attempts. I build ‘history paintings’ that are created in the process of dismantling and redress. I think of my forms as the upholstery and bulge of middle age, blank places for new memory. Failure, paralysis, grief and ultimately self-determination are cyclical points on the wheel of my work.
What inspires you?
Resilience, making do, courage, magic, craft, determination, beauty, nature, animals.
Can you speak about the process?
I edit, and edit, and re-vamp, my own dissatisfaction / disappointment becoming central to the meaning of the work. Materiality is important, be it re-shuffled pigments, soil, clays, eggs, milk, ground marble, egg shells, etc... i love the history and the journey of them. I love skin and supports, the armature or skeleton of structures...and the thin skins and bulge of materials... i think of them as portraits, of people, or as self portraits, the evidence of their 'lived experience is a part of their being. I like simple tools, Japanese saws, whittling knives etc., simpler, the better.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?
Breaking the waves, lars von trier, or any Ken Loach Film...
Crime and Punishment was a seminal book for me, I read and reread it in my teens. I just read Bee sting by Paul Murray and loved it, anything by Claire Keegan, Foster is so brilliant. I came to the US because of my love of Faulker... literature and the stories we tell have always been important to me. Deamon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover is another favourite and anything by Raymond Carver, James Baldwin.
Favourite artists: James Castle, Chardin, Soutine, Breughal, Piero della Francesca, Morandi
Favourite Quotes:
Fail again, fail better....
Samuel Beckett
Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of all the aristocracies of thought,
and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever
and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it
has gathered itself into the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts
of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.
W. B. Yeats
Mythologies
What advice do you have for younger artists?
Community is key to our survival as humans, be generous to everyone around you. Support your fellow artists, say yes when at all possible, go to each other's shows, studios etc., think of new ways, platforms to show each others work.
