The Face in the Mirror | Helen Taylor: prints, studies, objects

This exhibition comprises works from the State Art Collection made by Western Australia artist Helen Taylor (b1943- ) between 1975 and 1984.

After studying printmaking Taylor completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 1984. She made a significant contribution to the Western Australian arts community as a teacher at Curtin and Edith Cowan Universities, as a founding member of the Printmakers Association of WA, chair of the experimental art group Praxis, member of Artemis Women’s Art Forum, and an inaugural board member of the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Taylor’s numerous group and solo exhibitions saw her experiment with various techniques and subject matters, from performance photography to charcoal drawings, to installations reflecting on landscape and colonialism and those on the entwining of memory and space. Reflecting something of Taylor’s engagement across many media this exhibition includes finely made prints, drawings, an artist’s book and sculpture. Each sensitive and reflective work is guided by feminist (and other) social critique and a close observation of the world that sees her rendering the subtle intensities of places and spaces otherwise largely overlooked.

Rich in material feel, carefully composed and precisely finished, they offer distillations of life around her such as food, hairstyles, repeated views of a single hill, dresses, and furniture. They are never just what they depict however; each work is defined by a resonant quietness that touches on the languid even as it conveys a hint of mystery, contained intensity and, at times, just a hint of Pop. In the manner of a symbolic realist, Taylor’s rendering of the world that suggests not all is what it seems, that every view every object, may be holding back feelings undeclared, subtle darknesses, desire and doubts and that, of course, the everyday is never just that, it is brimming with possibility to be what it not yet is.