Helen has been working in the field of art, culture, language and communication for 25 years and her artistic development has been happily and heavily influenced by her intense involvement in Salzburg's art and culture scene where she has worked not only in the fields of language and communication but also in art, theatre and publishing. In addition she has frequently been involved in organising, speaking at and photographically and digitally documenting several art shows and events .
Much of her own work, however, has been developed during stays in Spain, Slovenia, Cyprus and the UK although the 90's series of work was done mainly in the UK and in Austria.
Although Helen works a lot with collage and oil crayon, taking snatches of human interaction from the newspapers, images from the television and transforming her own sketches and notes into new dialogue on paper, there is also a considerable photographic influence involved in the development of her work. Many of the moments and people are captured spontaneously on the camera of her mobile phone (which she happily refers to as "handy camera" in English too) a sort of digital lomo effect which she then prints and uses to make new stories, narratives and interactions, changing and alienating the identities, situations and encounters.
She has been very much engaged in the complexities of language and communication, celebrating her own passion for the endless possibilities of language and exploring the loneliness which can be felt during a dialogue, whether in your own language or a learnt language, or through social codes, secrets and lies. She is constantly confronted in all walks of her life with trying to transport messages of all kinds and attempts to process this visually, balancing on the borders between humour, irony with a sense of sorrow , in the knowledge that communication processes can go terribly wrong. To quote Popper, the more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate....
Helen asks if it is any easier to communicate through icons and images?