Helen Pynor

Born in Australia, Pynor's interest in art and biology has stemmed from extensive research in these fields. Pynor attained a Doctor of Philosophy, Sydney College of the Arts (2009), Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Science (Honours), Macquarie University, Sydney (1987). Recent major solo exhibitions include, Shadowbreath, Linden-St Kilda Contemporary Arts Centre, Melbourne in 2005, Defence Artspace, Sydney 1996. Milk, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, 2008. Love Letter Chez Robert Galerie, Web-based installation, France, 2008, curated by Michel Delacroix, red sea blue water 2007 and Swelling at dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne, 2009. Group exhibitions include Sydney Alternative Art Australian High Commission, Singapore. In 2008, Pynor was a Joint Winner in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the 2009 Winner, Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Artist Award as well as being Short-listed, 2009 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art. Pynor has been represented in the 2009 Hong Kong Art Fair. Pynor's works are held in numerous collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and is the recipient of Australia Council Grants.

Exhibitions

Swelling - 2009

This work takes as its starting point the plant medicinal remedies of the Dharawal people of the southern Sydney and Illawara region. Beginning with an exploration of the intricate relationships of dependence and mutuality that develop between people and their biophysical milieus, the work opens out into a baroque unfurling in which familiar spatial and somatic perception are destabilised. The spilling fluids in these images refer to, amongst other things, the fluids of bodies - blood, digestive juices, mucus, milk. Despite their grounding in the concreteness of the body's vulnerabilities and indiscretions, the images unfold in some other-worldly time and place, calling up broader themes of religiosity and the violences of history. Underneath these associations is a response based more in the world of sensation, of the work's softness and liquidity, the fluid cocooning of these young, denuded plants, floating, sinking, levitating or flying across space. Helen Pynor wishes to thank the Dharawal Elders and people, and John Lennis, for information on Dharawal medicinal practices used in the Milk project.

Helen Pynor - Milk 1 (sweet pittosporum)

Helen Pynor - Milk 6 (false sarsaparilla)

Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award - 2008

Joint Winner of the 2008 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photographic Award. "My work explores the 'porosity' of our bodies and the bleeding of memory and history through, and between, our bodies. Advice for a simple home remedy, sourced from the social archives of a previous era, drifts down into the liquid medium, blurring into and blending with a wet and unspecified organ of the body. The recipe speaks of an era we are rapidly forgetting, giving a melancholic feel to the work. But the recipe also speaks directly in the present, a blunt reminder of our shared experience of living in th bodies and their unavoidable indignities and frailties." Helen Pynor

red sea blue water - 2007

In my work I am interested in the concept of porosity: the porosity of bodies to experiences, the porosity of one generation to the next, the porosity of people to places, and vice versa. My work also explores invisible, unspoken or unacknowledged experiences and the way that these phenomena make themselves present via indirect ways. Or put another way, the persistence of these unacknowledged experiences through the inevitable porosity of people and places to them. In this series of images, all is floating in an ocean of sea-salt green. Text is scribed through water, threads drift downwards in a slow-motion descent, then tangle or fuse with recognisable and unrecognisable organs and spaces of the body, and the image sinks slowly into darkness. The hidden insides of our bodies, our organs, are somehow shameful. They inspire fear and disgust but at the same time, fascination: life-givers, pink, creamy, crimson, fleshy and shining with possibility, beautiful, repulsive and intriguing. In this series they float in what could be salt water, cleansing, preserving, healing, each organ inhabiting a deep, dark world resembling the body itself. The texts in these images are recipes from another era for the healing of the body: the instructions are blunt, sometimes humourous, and in their materiality are connected to the substance of simple domestic existence - a world of peeled potatoes, bread, olive oil and boiling water, a physical and visceral world, not a pharmaceutical one. I would like this work to suggest the porosity between the 'substance' of thoughts, and the substance of our bodies. In this metaphoric process thoughts drift down, conveyed by a million messengers, seamlessly, instantaneously, filtering in and bedding themselves into the very cells of our tissues and tissues of our being. What are the consequences of a porous world? In such a world thoughts don't exist in their own realm, devoid of material consequences. Diffusion takes place between the substances of our bodies, our places and our thoughts, leaking out, absorbing and affecting the other, a diffusion that also takes place across time and generations. Phenomena we are facing today, such as climate change, force us to accept that the world is more porous than we have thought.

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