The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi also strongly resonates with its appreciation of transience and imperfection.
Helen’s work focuses not on conventional picturesque views of the landscape, but on finding beauty in the ordinary and everyday - the simple bark of a tree or overgrown hedgerow. Helen’s colour palette and heavily worked surfaces - stitched, darned and patched - evoke the passage of time, the cycle of growth and decay, and the beauty to be found in impermanence and imperfection.
Helen’s work in this show is inspired by the landscape of the Waveney Valley - the borderland between Norfolk and Suffolk. This marshy landscape is shifting and uncertain – in some ways unchanged over centuries and yet constantly transformed by rhythms of the tides and the seasons. Her pieces, painstakingly pieced together from delicate tissue paper images and transformed through stitch, evoke the texture and space of this landscape in its peaceful fragile beauty.
Helen Derbyshire comes from a family of artists and craftspeople. She grew up spending all her free time drawing, sewing and making, and studied art to A level. Further education took her professional life in an entirely different direction however. She spent more than thirty years working with organisations including the Department for International Development, Oxfam and Christian Aid supporting social development in Africa, until her retirement in 2021.
In the mid-2000s, Helen took time away from work to study for a BA in Visual Studies at Norwich University College of the Arts, graduating with distinction. Here Helen developed elements of her distinctive style – experimenting with techniques; combining art, craft, photography and stitch; and balancing elements of control and chance. At that time, Helen exhibited extensively in Norfolk and more widely and her work is held in a number of private collections. Helen has returned to art in the last few years as an active member of the Norwich-based Art Pocket collective.
She draws and uses digital photography, in combination with experimental textile and mixed media approaches, drawing on and referencing domestic sewing skills and traditions. Traditional Japanese brush-painted and woodcut landscapes have always provided an inspiration - in their reverence for nature, their sense of light and space, and their focus on the beauty of simple natural forms.
ART EDUCATION
2005 BA Visual Studies, Norwich School of Art and Design (distinction)
BURSARIES AND PROJECTS
2006 Bursary, Waterways Arts Trail, Norwich Creative Writing Partnership
2006 Youth Arts project, Loddon, Norfolk
2006 Cross art form collaboration, Archbishop Sancroft High School, Harleston, Norfolk
2005-6 Bursary, Exchanging Views, Creative Arts East, Norfolk
2022 ongoing Volunteer with “A Creative Approach to our Textile Heritage” Heritage Lottery Funded Art for Well-Being project, Art at Work, Norwich
EXHIBITIONS
2023 Bold Perspectives, Norwich Makers Festival, Forum, Norwich
2022 Through Cloud and Sunshine, Anteros Art Foundation, Norwich
2022 Shape of a Pocket, The Old Shoe Factory, St Marys Works, Norwich
2022 Show of Hands, Anteros Arts Foundation, Norwich
2021 Together, St Margaret’s Church, St Benedicts, Norwich
2019 Tutti Frutti, St Margaret’s Church, Norwich
2019 Then: Now, Anteros Arts Foundation, Norwich
2016 City to Coast, Theatre Royal, Norwich
2016 Old Dairy Studios open studios art trail, Beccles, Suffolk
2015 Old Dairy Studios open studios art trail, Beccles, Suffolk
2010 Presence exhibition, The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk
2008 Balance, Bergh Apton Sculpture Trail, Norfolk
2007 360 degrees, City College, Norwich (with Presence collective)
2007 Eastern Open, Kings Lynn
2006 Out of Place, Blickling Hall, Norfolk
2006 Salthouse 06, Norfolk
2006 Natural Selection, EDP, Norwich Arts Festival Fringe (with Presence collective)
2006 Exchanging Views, touring exhibition Devon, Norfolk & Isle of Wight
2006 Norwich Red, Waterways Arts Trail, Norwich (with Presence collective)
2005 Present Continuous, EDP, Norwich Arts Festival Fringe (Presence collective)
2005 Cairns, Bergh Apton Sculpture Trail, Norfolk
2005 You are Here, Blickling Hall, Norfolk
2005 Landscape 200, Norwich Castle
2004 You are Here, Blickling Hall, Norfolk