Helen Denerley
Sculptor
Flux will be opening at Summerhall in Edinburgh on the 26th July and runs until 20th September 2024 as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The exhibition will fill five rooms, each with a different theme.
Scotsman Review by Susan Mansfield
Helen Denerley lives and works on a remote hillside in North East Scotland. Best known in Scotland for her scrap metal giraffes on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, her work has been commissioned in Japan and South Georgia and is in collections across the world. In 2022 Helen completed the Tree of Life for Dundreggan Rewilding Centre.
Helen’s work is the result of meticulous observation and drawing skills combined with a love of the natural world and all the technical aspects of working in metal. The forms are never whole, the use of negative space makes them come alive, creating form where there is only air. Helen has turned this into ‘Positive Space’.
Current and Recent Commissions
Solo Exhibition
‘Salvage has come together with the sort of great leaps only an artist with a lifetime sculpting experience can conjure. It is in many ways Helen Denerley’s Everest, a peak, in her output and at a time when most see the fragility in the natural world around us. Many also feel an affinity with the creatures she sculpts and we share the Earth with: the butterflies and pollinators that Denerley forms from discarded bicycle parts, springs and the now jewel-like screwdriver blades, the gentle grazing goats made from plough shares, a graceful flying red kite magicked from discarded scythe blades and small birds from old spoons. Here is a resurrection rising from things we throw away too quickly.’
Exhibitions
Salvage
A solo exhibition at Kilmorack gallery 5th to 31st August 2023
Sawyer Gallery, Inverewe Garden, Poolewe
Trees Meet Sea. A collaborative exhibition with Mandy Haggith, poet, and other artists.
April 2nd until the end of May 2022 and then Dundee Botanics, June and July 2022.
Hen Harriers Video
email: helen@helendenerley.co.uk
Work available at:
Kilmorack Gallery, Beauly
Rhue Gallery, Ullapool,
Tolquhon Gallery, Tarves
Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow
Moncrieff-Bray Gallery Petworth
Heinzel Gallery, Aberdeen