This article is sponsored content.

Sometimes delicate, occasionally whimsical, Capel-based artist Helen Seiver’s work is characterised by diversity.

Here she crochets wire, there she draws in ink and meticulously stitches details over the top, elsewhere she assembles and arranges found objects. Her choices of material and process, she says, are driven by the work and the question of which form will best represent the concept she wishes the explore.

In this Q&A Helen Seiver tells Nina Levy about what inspires her to create, and about the tale of redemption that lies behind The Poetics of Memory (11), the work she will be exhibiting at upcoming group exhibition ‘Tikvah (Hope)‘.

Nina Levy: What were you like as a child? What did you enjoy making when you were young?

Helen Seiver: I think as a child I was a frozen little being. I don’t recall ever making art or even using my imagination.

That said, my mother’s life presented a different creative making life. She was an inventive homemaker: cooking, sewing our clothes, knitting our jumpers, crochet as well as a celebrated floral arrangement practitioner.

I am also an inventive cook, as a child exhibited floral arrangements in the local horticultural society and I did make my clothes and those of my children. My mother taught me many of the skills I now use in my work, for example, knitting, sewing and embroidery. I think it was her example during my early life which now guides my work with domestic materials.

NL: At what point did you decide to pursue art as a profession? And where did that decision take you in terms of training, initially?

HS: I don’t think I made a decision to be a professional artist. As a young mother I went to evening TAFE classes to learn ceramics. It was my “outlet”, my own time during a busy week. This is where I became first became a “creative”. I potted for the next 25 years, just drifting into exhibiting my work but not as a definite decision.

What an adventure that was. I discovered … I could talk about very personal things as well as bigger issues of the environment and colonialism. I found my voice as well as creativity and graduated at 50 years old.

After those 25 years and following a relationship breakdown I wanted a new way to be creative; a new invented self. I decided to shift from Pemberton to Bunbury to go to ECU and study visual art.

What an adventure that was. I discovered I was an academic, I did have a great deal to say and that I could say it in a way that was uniquely me. I could talk about very personal things as well as bigger issues of the environment and colonialism. I found my voice as well as creativity and graduated at 50 years old.

NL: Something that I really enjoy about your work is the diversity of your materials, media and processes, across your works, but also within individual works – for example, in t(ruth) (2021) we see collars made variously of crocheted wires and beads, punched and serrated metal, painted metal. Then in 200ml or extinction (2020), you’ve used meticulous and detailed stitching on ink drawings. In contrast again is your work for “The Alternative Archive”, A Hot Cold Case, in which the work is in collecting and assembling objects.

And that’s just looking at three recent works! How did your practice evolve to take in so many ways of making?

HS: The continuing process which drives my practice is that the materials, methods, and forms reflect the substance of the concept I am speaking to.

My art practice includes work created in a variety mediums and techniques, including sewing, crochet and found objects to explore their unique quality to suggest time, place etc.

I look at found materials for the quality of historical information they bring. My principal themes are the environment but also intensely private explorations into processes to heal myself.

I look at found object and question: “How does this found item talk about my childhood?”, for example, or “what method can I use that reflects that I am a woman? How can I speak about the effects of colonialism as a non-Aboriginal woman?”

NL: Your work is also thematically diverse – as well as colonialism, the works mentioned above are driven by concerns about feminism and climate change. It does feel like there’s a through-line there, though. What do you feel is that through-line? What drives you to make new work?

HS: The enduring thread through my work is the depth of passion I feel for the concept, for whatever I am speaking to. Without the strength and commitment of emotion to the concept it is just too difficult to complete my statement of concern (or celebration).

I regularly use found objects and materials, exploring their unique quality of suggesting time, place and era. My artistic processes often involve long and sometimes quite laborious and repetitive processes which allows time to reflect deeply on the issues I am discussing or working through. Making art gives me processes to investigate and a platform from which to talk about the things that really matter to me; be they environmental, political or intensely personal issues.

I have a fundamental belief in the strength and power of women that is drawn from the everyday and my work reflects this, often reshaping and reformatting traditional female identified processes or using the non-traditional welding and woodwork.

I seek to look closely at things we take for granted and have forgotten to see, pushing boundaries of concepts, materials and exploring new techniques and processes drives my practice.

NL: Your work for the upcoming “Tikvah” exhibition is The Poetics of Memory (11). It’s created from lino scraps and in your artist statement you talk about the two sides of the lino, one that represents a kind of positive nostalgia, and the reverse side, which represents the Pilbara landscape as a site of “tremendous upheaval and grief of family tragedy”.

Can you tell me more about the story behind this work – what is your connection to the Pilbara and what pushed you to make this work?

HS: The Poetics of Memory (11) is part of a series of works that concerns a personal tragedy – the death of my father some 44 years ago, by a young Aboriginal boy, who was then just thirteen years of age.

Last July he and I travelled to the location of the tragedy. Together we performed ceremonies of cleansing, understanding, restitution and forgiveness, a meaningful combination of artistic processes and ceremony. Using materials from my home with materials of the Pilbara we created site-specific work, cleansed the site and spoke the many words of grief and forgiveness.

I have a fundamental belief in the strength and power of women that is drawn from the everyday and my work reflects this.

I struggled to write the significance of this time together and still have no words to adequately explain the emotions of what can only be described as transformation (a word so limited). Instead I had ideas to begin the expression of these concepts to create an important body of works, not just as a personal statement but to add to the growing awareness of different ways to forgive and reconcile.

I find that in the wider Australian movement of consciousness to reconciliation there has been no smooth passage of transition and transcendence. Yet here in this very personal face to face, in the sharing of creative artistic processes and illuminating rituals between cultures, there has been, for me, a loosening and releasing, an interweaving of our two sensitivities and understandings, and a place to allow our viewpoints to dissolve and our humanity transcend.

My first solo exhibition, “Third Space”, was primarily concerned with “why” of the event. It expressed my explorations into understanding why a 13 year old boy would shoot a man he had never known. Twenty two years of arts practice dipping into, returning to this challenge has sustained my very personal struggle to reconciliation. It has been a displacing of known “truths” (both familial and national) to allow the space to challenge resistance, and consent to change. It has been to defy my familial stories and to loosen their authority and structure. It is the small personal story that informs the larger reconciliation endeavour.

Helen Seiver’s work Poetics of Memory (11) will be on display at “Tikvah (Hope)”, 20-21 August 2022. “Tikvah” is an exhibition of works by established and emerging West Australian artists, curated by Joanne Baitz, at Mossenson Galleries, Subiaco. Proceeds from the exhibition opening and sales will go towards providing shelter and support to Ukrainian refugees arriving in Israel, as well as other women and children in need. The exhibition is presented by WIZO WA.

You can also see Helen’s work at “South West Art Now”, currently showing at The Goods Shed, until 4 September 2022.

Pictured top is Helen Seiver. Photo supplied.