Helen Gauchat

Born Sydney, Australia

Lives Southern Highlands (Gundungurra)

Helen Gauchat’s latest still life works are intimate yet dynamic paintings depicting the ceramics she has created. Drawing on both Eastern and Western sensibilities, at the heart of these paintings is a confident, curious and responsive gesture and an openness to chance, perhaps best defined by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, wherein perfection is sought through imperfection.

The idea of making the ‘props’ for her still lives came as a result of being offered a place in a ceramics class at Sturt Mittagong, a pre-eminent school of Arts and Crafts originally founded by Winifred West as part of the Frensham School.

“Form, scale, colour and texture all play their part in creating both paintings and ceramics and just as paint reacts to paper and canvas, glazes react to clay surfaces in firing. Finding the balance between chance and control is an ongoing challenge but that is what appeals to me most about these mediums. Knowing the objects intimately, both successes and imperfections, I continue my discovery and investigation when painting them, considering the placement and their relationship to one another. There’s a particular intimacy in knowing both the subject and the object.”

Gauchat is a graduate from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts followed by an Honours year at COFA, UNSW. She has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas and has been selected as a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, the Redlands Art Prize and has won the Fishers Ghost Prize. Gauchat works predominantly from her studio in the Southern Highlands.