Helen Sear is a photographic artist whose work engages with the natural environment, and considers the different ways that we experience it, be it physically, sensually or visually.
Born in Gloucestershire, Sear studied Fine Art at Reading University followed by the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work came to prominence in the late 1980s when she worked primarily with installation, performance and film. In the early 1990s, she turned increasingly to photography.
This has remained her chosen medium ever since but Sear also challenges the ways in which photography captures our world, for example through the fixed-point perspective and through a purely visual experience. Her works thus explore ways in which photography can also evoke and elicit sensory and emotional responses. Focusing on the world of nature – flowers and plants as well as humans – her images often have an enchanted and ethereal quality (sometimes achieved through digital manipulation), which reflects her interest in magical realism, surrealism and conceptual art.
Amgueddfa Cymru has two works by Sear in its collection: Blocked Field (Raglan) (2012), a vast work that focuses on stack of hay bales, and Company of Fields (2015).
Over the course of her career Sear has won many awards, from the British School of Rome (1993) to the National Eisteddfod of Wales (2011). In 2015, she was selected to represent Wales at the 56th Venice Biennale – the first woman to do so. Having lived and worked for a long period in Wales, she is now based in France.
Mari Griffith is an art historian who has worked in the field of museums and galleries for 30 years, developing and overseeing learning and interpretation provision for public art collections and exhibitions, including at the National Gallery, National Gallery of Art and Royal Academy of Arts. Following a period working internationally on art and heritage interpretation, she is now a freelance writer, editor and translator – focusing mostly on art.
