For this exhibition at Ballina Arts Centre, Helen Hughes presents a new body of work. Here she has limited her wide range of her materials to just three – rubber, plastic and expanding foam. This new work was influenced by the unique setting of this gallery – the strong presence of moving water, its proximity and imposing energy pervading the interior spaces. Her starting point for this work was a series of floatation devices from which the works evolved.
Hughes’s process initially involves much time researching materials, experimenting by folding, dripping, expanding, inflating and conjuring up many iterations of an idea in the studio before allowing the works to evolve with conviction.
Her practice is concerned with making. She collaborates with materials, engaging in a type of co- creation to delicately harness their realities and potentialities and then showcasing the physical ambiguities and aesthetic tensions that emerge. Pushing against commercially driven design concepts, she acts instead to support the internal narratives and dramas of materials, giving them centre stage and prompting them to play out in sculptural objects. Drawing on an aesthetic of superficiality and surface-level seduction invoked by visual references to pop culture and kitsch, in the making there is deep material engagement and slow, personal craft.
Leaning into the enchantment of materials and forms, Helen Hughes works to discover qualities that have been sleeping within, to awaken them, and let them be seen as something else.