Helen Merrigan Colfer is the 3-Dimensional Artist Spotlight winning artist for the month of February 2021. She is an award-winning Irish artist based along the southeastern Wexford coastline on the tip of the Hook Head Peninsula.
Helen’s Solo Art Exhibition will be featured on the website for the month of February 2021. The gallery will promote Helen and her work on the Fusion Art website, individual online press releases to hundreds of outlets, email blasts to over 5,500+ buyers, collectors, galleries and art professionals, in online event calendars, art news websites and through the gallery’s extensive social media outlets. Fusion Art’s objective is to promote the Artist Spotlight winning artists, worldwide, to art professionals, gallerists, collectors and buyers.
Please read Helen’s Biography and Artist Statement below as she describes her history and inspiration in her own words. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see her exhibition.
If you are interested in purchasing any of these award-winning pieces, or to see more of Helen’s work, please visit her website.
Also, please visit Fusion Art’s YouTube Channel to see Helen’s Solo Art Exhibition Video.
Thank you to all the artists who participated in the Artist Spotlight competition and congratulations to Helen and the other Artist Spotlight winning artists.
Artist Biography
Helen Merrigan Colfer is an award winning Irish Artist living along the Southeastern Wexford coastline on the tip of the Hook Head Peninsula.
Her artistic inspiration is nature; you can become enveloped, protected & shielded within its innocence. Following a lengthy break and receiving counseling for depression in 2015, Helen returned to her work and has been integrating her journey of recovery & discovery of self-identity in her sculptures.
Her work involves hand modeling over steel armatures engaging both additive & reductive techniques. Occasionally she creates work specifically to be cast into bronze in small limited editions of 6, 9 or 15 using the lost wax technique.
Her choice of surface decoration include 23-carat gold leaf, handmade oils & enamels. Helen has an Hons BFA & an Hons. H.Dip Ed in the principles of Art & Design Education from the Waterford Institute of Technology & the Crawford College of Art, Cork, Ireland
Artist Statement
Since 2015 after finally addressing years of internalized struggles & receiving counseling I found that my road to self-recovery lay in looking backwards, engaging with my emotional memories & finding my way forward resulting in a three dimensional memoir in search of my own personal identity. My sculpture depicts the dichotomy of who we are versus how we present ourselves to others.
My main artistic concern has been focused on the fragility of identity within the context of childhood, the effects of external influences and how these continue to inform us as adults. My work forms an emotional memoir narrating and giving physical form to the internal mental landscape constructed during my childhood years. These constructs, once in place, create an internal typography where patterns of thought and behavior are formed, imbedded and ingrained so that they are normalized internally while simultaneously causing us to feel separated from others who do not navigate the same interior terrain.
I create anatomically realistic figures incorporating structures and motifs, which interact to form narratives, which develop as the spectator interacts with the work. Hard architectural constructs are meshed with anatomically correct forms, which limit physical autonomy suggesting internal dialogues and states of being. My more recent work has become more limited in its palette as I began to realize how much hues hid the silence that I wanted to instill in my work.
