Helen O’Brien’s work in Dear Earth at Kirkcaldy Galleries | Photography © Lydia Smith
Helen O’Brien
Helen O’Brien’s work investigates human relationships with our surroundings, environment, and the natural world. The bronze work, Fruiting Body, is cast from a birch polypore fungus she observed growing near her home in Perthshire. Seeing the large form emerging from a narrow birch trunk, she was drawn to its form protruding and counterbalancing, as if suspended.
O’Brien seized the chance to cast the polypore when she noticed it had fallen to the ground, this action offering a permanence and significance to its otherwise fleeting existence. The accompanying bronze casts and preserved natural fungi highlight our connection to natural objects, and draw attention to the often unseen or overlooked.
Biography
Helen O’Brien is originally from Warwickshire, and moved to Perthshire in 2003, working as a public artist, and then an arts co-ordinator curating and facilitating creative projects with children, young people and communities. O’Brien studied at Cardiff Art College, University of Wales before attaining an MFA in Arts & Humanities at DJCAD, University of Dundee in 2020.
As an artist and maker, she is interested in the potential of materials, and our relationship and dependency we have on them. Her practice of casting organic matter directly into bronze seeks to elevate the value of unseen and overlooked organic matter to highlight its importance and integral role in our ecosystem.
O’Brien’s work is held in private collections in Scotland, USA, Australia and New Zealand. Recent projects include a public art commission Remembering Together, Blairgowrie & Rattray (2024); a solo exhibition Temporal Matter, Perth Creative Exchange (2022) and Moray Art Centre, Findhorn (2023); and group exhibitions Winter Exchange, Perth Creative Exchange (2022); and Sculpture Now, Society of Scottish Artists, online (2021).