Helen Gauchat’s still life works are quietly intimate yet dynamic paintings, depicting the ceramics she has created. Drawing on both Eastern and Western sensibilities, at the heart of these paintings is a confident, curious and responsive gesture and an openness to chance perhaps best defined by the Japanese tea ceremony aesthetic of wabi-sabi wherein perfection is sought through imperfection.
Gauchat’s exquisitely arranged tableaus of utilitarian vessels contain a subtle tension between a sense of the ceremonial countered by one of schism and possibility. Responding fluidly to the idiosyncrasies of each object and the relations between them,
Helen is a graduate from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts followed by an Honours year at COFA, UNSW. She has exhibited in a number of group shows in Australia and overseas. She has been selected as a finalist in The Mosman Art Prize, The Redlands Art Prize and she has won the Fishers Ghost Prize for works on paper. Helen works predominantly in her studio in the Southern Highlands.
