The paintings of Helen Flockhart RSA (Elect) emerge from an intuitive process, weaving the conscious and unconscious, building up layers of oil until a taught and richly worked surface is realised, making manifest an often fecund world which has a life and logic of its own. The perpetual gathering of images and visual stimuli, as well as ideas arising from reflections on myth, stories and poems, combine with an intimate dialogue on a very small scale in her sketchbook using quite an automatic drawing process. An intermediate stage of fluid drawing in oil pastel precedes an idea’s final realisation in paint, a stage which can span several months to a year on a single piece.
Of particular interest are an analysis of tropes and stereotypes rooted in historical, biblical, mythological sources, how they have been repeated down the years and assimilated into our ways of seeing, and what the choice to perpetuate them reveals about our attitudes, prejudices and perceptions in the here and now.