Who Helen Corr is a visual artist whose practice is characterised by her complete curiosity about her relationships with others. Her recent works have focused on the experience of watching first her mother and then her father go into palliative care and die. Her works combine the mediums of photography, painting and printmaking; with the often densely layered photographs suggestive of multiple layers of self. Helen has just completed a BA of Photography with a specialization in fine arts at the Queensland College of Art and is always interested in opportunities for collaborations and exhibiting.
Zine No 2 The Printmaking Special
Contact
June 2015
Email: helenccorr@gmail.com
HCC
HELEN C CORR Helen C Corr
Visual Artist
Artist Statement
My drawings don't start with a 'beautiful mark'," writes Kentridge, thinking about the activity of printmaking as being about getting the hand to lead the brain, rather than letting the brain lead the hand. "It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kentridge).
Death. Diminishment of the physical. Bodies, space and place. These series of works are influenced by my spending time in a palliative care ward. They are influenced by a need to give voice to the discourse of the sacred places that contain the worlds of the scared and dying. As such each plate contains images, but also words that were spoken to me during my time in this place. The series of images are set in the palliative care ward. The figures appear gaunt and almost bodiless as a representation of their gradual loss of social place/position. In one image a rainbow python is in the process of devouring a patient. This is a homage to an indigenous Australian cultural reference to cycles of creation. I use clocks and old currency for their more culturally European metaphorical allusions to time and the past. In making these images I employed techniques of intaglio and monoprinting; with graphic outlines rendered in black and a rainbow style roller application of inks to the plate. This graphic effect provided the comic book format that I desired as a familiar and ‘friendly’ genre that could carry a serious message in a way that people were comfortable with. The rainbow roller effect added a three dimensional look to the prints and allowed for a more random application of colour than single layer colour printing would have. Randomness felt appropriate to the project as there is nothing tidy about death. For this reason the works were created on hand made paper.
Handmade paper adds the element of humanity and random perfection that machine made paper would lack. I wanted the rough edges, uneven thickness and generally tactile presence handmade paper provided. The edges of death are rough; even with hospital corners and this work needed to reflect that. The work also needed to reflect a culturally western unease with death.
In order to portray this unease the colours that I use are mostly muted, slightly darkish, while the figures are roughly hewn and rise from hard platforms bearing grim or frightened faces. In this they take some influence form the works of Anna Pacheco whose work Comedia I lurches uneasily out of the darkness and Bill Viola whose figures in his video installation works lose and gain form as he bathes them in light and water. It draws also on the rougher sensibilities of Roger Ballan whose monochromatic practice mixes the mediums of fine art and photography using bleak, childlike paintings in his photography and video works. Jenny Watson and her touching colourful paintings of figures influence my work as her pieces are generally autobiographical, her figures simply rendered and the backgrounds sparse. My work aims to do all of that, though it mostly aims to represent my life.