New Works by Helen Pynor

PhD candidate, Helen Pynor will be exhbiting new works at Dominik Mersch Gallery until 22 November. Pynor’s work reflects her ongoing fascination with the porosity between mind and body, culture and biology, body and memory. For this exhibition she has undertaken an ambitious photographic project that explores the interiority of the human body, evoking a sense of slippage between time, cultural memory, and the tissues of the body. In the cool, watery, disorientated atmosphere of the photographs, visceral immediacy diffuses into the narratives of other times and divergent cultures, in a gesture that collapses past and present.

In the first photographic series, Milk, Pynor presents medicinal plants used by the Dharawal people of the Sydney and Illawarra region. The plants merge with ambiguous fluids that gradually unfurl, as if in slow motion, curling around plants and dispersing through the surrounding medium. The shared fates of bodies and plants entwine, whilst cultural histories and futures (those acknowledged and unacknowledged) are divined.

In the second photographic series, red sea blue water, threads from embroidered home remedies drift downwards and tangle with bodily organs that float in apparent suspension. The mysterious potency of these images emerges partly from our strange identification with them: as we gaze at the images, our own interior is silently reflected back. Both series open out a plethora of metaphoric possibilities through the tensions between their potential perversity, their inference of the healing gesture, and their calming beauty.

Helen Pynor has lived and worked in Sydney and Paris. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, seeking reconciliation between humanities-based and scientific understandings of embodiment. Pynor’s work was featured in the Winter 2008 edition of Photofile and she was recently named joint winner of the prestigious Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photographic Award, Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Helen Pynor wishes to thank John Lennis and the Dharawal Elders for providing information on Dharawal medicinal practices for this project.

Image: Helen Pynor, Milk, 2008. C-type print, face-mounted to glass. 100 x 66cm.