Helen Martino is fascinated by body language and how it is communicated. To Helen the exaggerated and stylised movements of the silent movies has seemed a natural way to portray communication and narrative as the sculptures depict moments in the everyday life of people.

 

Helen has been looking at Mogul and Persian miniatures and how they tell a story within a single image.  Often they show significant events within the life span of a person or family.  Helen's sculptures are intimate in size and life, the miniatures tell of a single moment or event and yet they infer a past and future story to be filled in by the viewer.

 

Helen works in a series of pieces within a single narrative, each successive sculpture expressing the story in a different way through a change in scale, movement, composition or colour.

 

The sculptures are a slab built in a traditional way, applying slips, underglaze colours and oxidised to the surface by varying methods. Helen then fires the sculptures to stoneware temperatures in a gas kiln.