Helen Denerley
Sculptor
Helen Denerley lives and works on a remote hillside in North East Scotland. Since graduating from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen in 1977 she has worked continuously as a sculptor. Best known in Scotland for her larger than life scrap metal giraffes on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, her work has been commissioned in Japan and South Georgia and is in collections across the UK. In 2016 Helen completed a 6m giraffe for a private client in Hong Kong.
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.
One of the “Best Things to do in Scotland in August”
according to the Herald Newspaper.
Flight Paths
A group exhibition of birds at the Scottish Ornothological Club Gallery, Aberlady. September 2023
July 2024 Exhibition at Summerhall galleries Edinburgh as part of the Fringe festival.
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