As part of our Culture Night celebrations, Helen G Blake will also be in the gallery on Friday 16 September at 6pm for a meet and greet.

Helen G Blake is a Wicklow painter whose practice focuses on colour, engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation guide the evolution of the work, her small, overtly hand-made paintings record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms.

Andrew Wilson, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, has written of Blake’s work that is underpinned by process – “always variously methodical and rational, yet also absurd and affected by the interruption of chance.  In Blake’s paintings, colour is deployed to follow a given order and yet these are paintings of nature … not the rigid order of an urban modernism, but the texture and rhythms, and immediacy of life unfolding.”

Mermaid Arts Centre is delighted to present this body of work which also includes a new suite of paintings initiated during a 6 week residency at The Model, Sligo.