Off Balance: Catalogue Text for exhibition by Helen Lees. Written by Adrienne Ranson.

The Sorceress and the Storyteller

Upon asking Helen Lees about her inspirations and studio practice for her current exhibition "Off Balance" her repsonses ran at tangents to each other, veering towards and then away from any definitive meaning. A viewer could easily be seduced into reading Lee's images as symbolic of psychological and somatic states experienced and codified by the artist. However hers is not a journey of Jungian self-discovery rather her image making is an attempt at thinking a plurality of feelings and responses in order to arrive at an apparent and unresolved collection of narrative or stories that express a multiple of states she titles "Off Balance".

Lees emphasises that there is no type of balance preferred nor is being 'off' necessarily an undesirable state. Being 'off balance' in these images is an affective and positive experience in which the relations between motivating thoughts and feelings create the experience embedded in the image. Lees reports being influenced by feeling and thought states such as the hidden, the awkward, the isolated, in focus, out of focus, self-analysis, self-absorption, over indulgence, transitions, choices. In her studio she is submerged within the relations between these thoughts and feeling states resulting in a series of vignettes that touch upon each other and yet are wholly singular moments. They are images that are a part of a multiplicity of storylines that could continue inexhaustibly and at the same time cannot be pinpointed as owning any inherent meanings. I am reminded of the 'passionate trance' storytellers recounted by Jungian ananlyst and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes who writes of one of the "oldest ways of telling wherein the teller "senses" [sic] the audience - be it an audience of one or many - and then enters a state between worlds, where a story is "attracted" [sic] to the trance-teller and told through her" (1992, p.19). In this way Lees has entereds her 'trance state' in the studio, her listeners being the self or selves that are moved by her chosen thoughts and feelings. In this manner she creates a highly personal and private visual narrative that enters the spaces between words, the symbols or codified signs that are used to make a story.

I site Lees in the anomalous position of the sorceress who haunts the fringes "at the edges of the fields or the woods", the borderline of the village, or between villages as written by the contemporary philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1998, p.256). For sorcery is a phenomenon of bordering (ibid) wherein the artist through her personal experience of the relations between affective states that interest her creates thresholds or doors that transform the 'fascinated self" into multiple becomings.

References

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1988).
A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Althone Press: London.

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Random House: Auckland.