View Finder 4

Location

Country: Switzerland
City: Berne
Place: British Embassy

Helen Sear’s View Finder series presents a group of 12 photographs of hay bales in a rural landscape. The formal cylindrical structure of the hay bales contrasts with the natural environment around them, creating a tension with the organic, tactile texture of the bales themselves. Viewed through the artist's lens, the hay bales appear as consistent central objects, disrupting how we perceive the landscape that they sit within. Photography is both a key subject and medium in Sear's work, where she often challenges the dominance of the eye and the fixed-point perspective associated with the camera lens. While her photographic manipulations are often barely perceptible, she deploys these to explore the potential of the photographic image to activate or elicit a response from her viewers in the way a drawing or painting might. Her practice engages with how human, animal and natural environments co-exist, which she filters through her interest in magical realism and surrealism. In these photographs, rendered as silver gelatin prints, the hay bales feel as if they have undergone a transformation, becoming accentuated by the lack of shadows that we might expect them to throw on the ground around them. They consciously echo French Impressionist Claude Monet's painting, Haystacks, where shadows are central to his composition.

Helen Sear studied Fine Art at Reading University and later at the Slade School in London. Her photographic works in the 1991 British Council exhibition De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain toured extensively in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Sear was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. Her work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Pennings Foundation, Eindhoven, Holland and Impressions Gallery, Bradford (2019); and the Glyn Vivian Museum and Art Gallery, Swansea (2017), as well as in group exhibitions including at the Swedenborg Film Festival, London; the Royal West of England Academy and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (all in 2023); The Grange, Rottingdean, Brighton; the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and Centre Space Bristol (all in 2021); and the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Royal Academy, London (2020). In 2021 she was voted one of the key 100 women photographers practising globally by The Royal Photographic Society.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

photograph (as object name), silver gelatin print

Artist

Helen Sear (1955 - )

Title

View Finder 4

Portfolio Title

View Finder

Date

2017

Medium

silver gelatin print

Dimensions

height: 30.5 cm; width: 33.0 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from James Hyman Gallery, March 2022

Provenance

James Hyman Gallery, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2022

GAC number

19097/2