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Helen Wilks"Childhood Fragment inhabits the seemingly minor interstices of child hood experience to remind and confront the shades and memories of them. For they are still held, somewhere echoing inside the adult. Through attention to the ordinary I seek to animate these intimate and vivid worlds, laying bare the prosaic memories that childhoods so frequently hold In common. The Childhood Fragments have become a painted tragicomedy of internal narratives and moments holding vulnerabilities and worries, confusions and delights, mischiefs and enthusiasms. These commonplace bits and pieces of experience are at once unexceptional and yet precious. Children everywhere live a life packed with emotional force. Small things may have overwhelming Importance then. Inside this microcosm we grow and fight our way until adulthood cloaks our memory and requires of us the use of perspective. For me painting holds its meaning and value as essentially a contemplative and intimate language. As well as continuing the Childhood Fragments, I am engaged on a very large narrative painting project connected to some of the same preoccupations, but also based on the ideas of the emptied pace inside the room of Velaquez's Las Meninas. " |
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Biography Helen Wilks (b.1950) studied fine art (painting) at Bath Academy of Art (1966-9) and at the University of Reading (1970-1). She is Head of Humanities at the City & Guilds of London Art School, a small independent art college offering a BA and MA in Fine Art. |
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| 1982 | Bridge Street Gallery, Bath |
| 1983 | Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Festival |
| 1984 | Bloomsbury Theatre, London |
| 1985 | Greenwich Theatre Art Gallery, Greenwich |
| 1985 | Epsom Playhouse, Epsom |
| 1986 | Battersea Arts Centre |
| 1986 | Watermans Arts Centre, London |
| 1987 | The Wells Centre, Norfolk |
| 1990 | Clarendon Gallery, London |
| 1992 | Capps & Capps, Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature |
| 1993 | The Pump House Gallery, London |
| 1994/ 5 | The Royal College of Pathologists, London |
| 1995 | La MétaphoreThéåtre National, Lille, France |
| 1998 | The Freud Museum, London |
| 1999 | Galeria Ca’s Cosi, Banyalbufar, Mallorca |
| 1999 | The Tavistock Clinic, London |
| 2002/ 3 | House exhibitions, London |
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| 1981 | Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames |
| 1981/ 2 | Bridge Street Gallery, Bath |
| 1983 | National Poetry Centre, London Portraits of 20th-Century Poets (prize winner) |
| 1985 | Ashley Gallery, Epsom Behind the August Mask |
| 1989 | Battersea Arts Centre, London Mask |
| 1990 | Boundary Gallery, London |
| 1990/ 1 | Rye Art Gallery, Sussex Painters’ Tales, Serious Arrangements |
| 1991 | Roy Miles Gallery, London British Month |
| 1992 | Blasón Gallery, London |
| 1992/ 3 | Royal Academy of Arts, London Summer Exhibitions |
| 1992/ 4 | Roy Miles Gallery, London |
| 1994 | Lamont Gallery, London |
| 1994 | Kilvert Gallery, Hay-on-Wye |
| 1995/ 9 | Beatrice Royal Art Gallery, Hampshire Pandora’s Box |
| 1996 | Rye Art Gallery, Sussex Childhood Remembered |
| 1997 / 8 | Oriel Theatr Clwyd, North Wales Women on Men, (touring exhibition) |
| 1999 | Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath |
| 2000 | Art First, London |
Selected commissions
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| 1983 | Pen and ink illustrations for Master Peter Pathelin
trs : Edwin Morgan. Published : Third Eye Centre, Glasgow 1983 |
| 1985 | Drawings for the screenplay Maybe Baby by Jack Klaff. First transmitted : BBC2, July 1985 |
| 1987 | Large-scale design, Horsefair Shopping Arcade, Wisbech |
| 1991 | Performance portrait of Richard Armstrong, conducting Salomé
with the English National Opera at the Coliseum, London |
| 1993 | Various children’s workshops and school visits in London and Buckinghamshire |
| 1999/2000 | Two private portrait commissions |
| 2002 | Complete (non-commissioned) portrait of the philospher, A C Grayling |
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| 1985 | Epsom Playhouse (Autumn) |
| 1986 | Long Crendon (Resurrection Plays, April) |
| 1986 | Battersea Arts Centre (Dance Days, July) |
| 1994 | Paines Plough (Collaborative visual artist for Wax) |
| 1995 | Bexley Arts Education Forum (Artist in residence at Dulverton School, July) |
St Mary’s Church, Long Crendon
Epsom and Ewell Borough
Council
Victoria & Albert Museum, (Theatre Museum
collection)
Beckett International Foundation, University of
Reading
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| 1991 | The Times, John Russell Taylor (British Month at the Roy Miles Gallery) March 6th |
| 1993 | ‘Childhood Fragment’ paintings the subject of BBC Radio
3 ‘”Nightwaves”. Interview and discussion presented by Michèle Roberts, April 29th |
| 1995 | Eastleigh & South Hants Weekly News, (Images of
innocence) February 15th |
| 1995 | Interview with Dee Pilgrim “The Net”, London Radio, March 25th |
| 1996 | BBC World Service, “Speaking of English”. An interview with Liz Maloney about using words to describe paintings |
| 1998 | Childhood Fragments. Catalogue published by the Freud Museum containing two essays : “Fragments of memory” by Eva Hoffman; and “A painted tragi-comedy of internal narratives” by Sanda Miller |
| 1998 | Hampstead & Highgate Express (Exposing children’s emotional see-saw), November 20th |
| 1998 | Modern Painters , Winter Issue. Review by George Szirtes of “Childhood Fragments” exhibition at the Freud Museum, London |
| 2002 | The Daily Telegraph , ‘What is Childhood?’ by Rebecca Abrams, April 20th |
| 2003 | For and After, ‘The Crack’ by Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, London |
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| 1983 | Contemporary Portrait Society (prizewinner) |
| 1993 | Wandsworth Borough, Arts Fund |
| 1995 | London Arts Board Award |
| 1998 | John S Cohen Foundation |
| 2003 | Nominated for Jerwood Artists Platform Award |
Publications
(Books)
The Conservation Sourcebook Researched, compiled and
edited
Published : Crafts Advisory Committee , London, 1979
Science For Conservators Series Editor, initiator and
project manager,
Published : Crafts Council (1982/3), London
Book 1
: An Introduction to Materials;
Book 2 : Cleaning;
Book 3 :
Adhesives and Coatings
(Since reprinted several times by MGC)
The British Antique Dealers’ Association Handbook Founding
Editor
Issues published : BADA, London 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989
and1990
Conservation in storage Editor
Published : Oxford University Press
1990
(Selected papers and articles)
‘Art and
Craftsmanship’ Crafts (July / August 1978); ‘Caring for Objects’
Crafts (September / October 1980; ‘Preparation of the Science for
Conservators Teaching Series’ ICOM Preprints (Ottawa 1981), and others
A panoramic circle of eleven paintings passing through 360 degrees, fifty three feet long and six feet high. Begun in 1996, and painted off and on ever since, it remains a work in progress.
The painting is a meditation on the space both physical and metaphysical which a person inhabits in their life. The complex ways in which the mind and body consciously and unconsciously occupy the space‚ we live in are common to us all. But those who stay in a still room for any time, say to write, compose music, paint or even just to think, share a further dimension of space. They are using an imaginative, remembered and felt space which winds through their physical one. This painting is necessarily about the space of a female painter and of the life which exists independent of the physical space which doubly feeds and pins us down. My task here is to make this mesh of spaces‚ visible.
