Messums Publications are publishing a new book celebrating the work of Tyga Helme and documenting her career with Messums to date. Includes solo exhibitions at the Cork Street, London gallery and her artist residency at The Corridor Project, NSW, Australia.
Includes images of her most iconic works and a foreword by Johnny Messum. Essays by Dr Claudia Milburn, Peter Haynes and a piece by author Tamara Colchester to accompany Tyga’s current exhibition ‘We are the Knots & Tangles’.
£20
Messums London is pleased to present the highly anticipated new series of works by Tyga Helme, created over a year of returning to the same viewpoints again and again to capture the flux and movement of unceasing growth and evolution in her environment. The exhibition comprises 56 works, ranging in scale, representing a significant development in Helme’s practice.
Helme’s past work has primarily centred on drawing in soft chalk pastel; however, for this exhibition, she has explored the possibilities of oil pastels. ‘Whether chalk or oil, the sticks I use can feel awkward and childlike – they force you to be out of control.’ Both her chosen medium and the energy she draws from being surrounded by nature allows Helme to work quickly on small sheets of paper which she joins together to form larger images, leaving exposed the ground of each painting.
Helme takes a macro lens to the natural world, studying thickets, trees, sea and sky in a vibrant, expressionistic palette which intensifies the contrasts she observes and the feeling of movement she draws from her subjects. For her, prolonged, deep observation is a process that unlocks empathy with the subject of her attention. ‘When I spend a long time painting brambles,’ she says, ‘I start to dream of them, almost become them.’
Over time, the small areas she draws ‘become whole worlds’, ‘little slices of wildness.’ She says: ‘I like the rhythms and patterns found in growth and decay and the dance of the spaces between the leaves. Drawing the minutiae can feel like an exploration of opposing ideas; of calm then chaos, of awkwardness then ease, of known and unknown. You think you understand what you are looking at one minute and then feel completely lost the next. This is what I always seem to look for when I start, for a feeling of being lost, I want to feel like I have no idea how to begin. I guess some writers have described it as the sublime in nature.’
