Helen Glassford is a recent graduate of the MFA postgraduate art course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Originally from Cumbria, she is now based in Dundee, Scotland.

Helen has been exhibiting her work widely throughout the UK since the mid 1990’s, and has won a number of awards, including 'The Sir Robin Phillipson Memorial Medal' at the Royal Scottish Academy Students Exhibition, the 'Cuthbert New Young Artist' award and the prestigious 'Armour Award' at the Royal Glasgow Institute.

Helen Glassford’s paintings are in essence abstractions of the Scottish landscape in which she finds herself immersed. Her painting is in a constant state of flux, a condition perpetuated by her experience of the shifting weather systems that roll inexorably across this landscape, as a counterpoint to the slow creep of geological time. She reacts freely to the immensity of nature before her, attempting both to capture the spirit of place, and humanity’s transient experience of it.

Graphite scratched across a primed ground, loose colour washes, determined single brush strokes, and ghostly scumbled glazes are just some of the techniques used to convey a sense of place at a particular moment in time. The marks are chosen with a considered awareness of what is needed to convey a sense of the shifting, fluid elements of the changing patterns in nature, and although the work is undoubtedly informed by the Scottish landscape in terms of its pallet and surface, it is equally concerned with the paint itself, its application, and its role as a visual language that seeks to convey the artist’s perceptions of living in the landscape.