Helen Kincaid, 'Sleep'

Drawing on the parallels between painting and our relationship to photographic images and processes, Helen Kincaid’s work explores ideas around our anchorage on past and present, meaning and absence, fragmentation and erasure. She’s interested in the increasingly elusive notion of a whole, of seeing the complete picture and the idea that we are only ever dealing with fragments, traces, disconnections and gaps.

Kincaid works with images of soft furnishings, curtains, wallpaper, upholstery – elements that often boundary our interior spaces. She is interested in how these ‘coverings’ act as a form of screen or veil, a protective but inhibiting barrier to what is beyond view, how their recesses, folds and surface become psychological spaces, timeless micro landscapes, where perspective shifts and the figurative becomes abstracted.

Kincaid’s process involves working with multiple images, cutting, tearing, folding and reassembling the photographic fragments; looking for a collision of ill fitting parts that might suggest transformation or new meaning, the familiar on the verge of becoming something else, what Blanchot described as ‘unrevealed yet manifest’. Using a series of thin oil glazes the paintings are rendered with as little paint and as few brush marks as possible, reinforcing the idea of a fragile layer of pigment over a blank surface, just as in the construction of a photograph. This parallel with painting highlights for her an interesting contrast in scale between a physical thing and an idea – a literal and symbolic proximity of something and nothing.

Helen Kincaid is an artist and curator based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. She was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2023 and the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2022. Selected exhibitions include When the Curtain Falls at Blueshop Gallery, London , Hopscotch at Bonian Space, Beijing and ART021 in Shanghai, China in 2024; JMPP 2023 at The Walker Gallery Liverpool; CBPP at Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Studio Gallery, Gestura ll at Marie Jose Gallery London and A Generous Space at Hastings Contemporary in 2022; the 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Delayed Rays of a Star at the Hardwick Gallery, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, 2018 and DATA at The Contemporary Art Society, London.