2025 Artist
Mandorla is very pleased to welcome Helen Seiver as our inaugural participant in the New Norcia Artist Residency.
This unique residency provides the artist with financial support, accommodation and a studio within the newly renovated Old Trading Post building at New Norcia, which is also home of the Mandorla Art Collection.
Helen will be undertaking her one-month residency at New Norcia in spring 2025. She intends to explore embroideries and handmade artefacts within the New Norcia archives to look at the social and environmental history of the site. She has a deep interest in how non-traditional materials can be used with historical techniques of making to examine her own intergeneration connection to Western Australia. Helen aims to push the boundaries of material-manipulation within her practice while drawing from personal, matrilineal and site-based histories.
To follow Helen’s residency and find out about open studio and artist talk events during her time at New Norcia, please follow us on social media or subscribe to Mandorla’s newsletter.
MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Based in the regional south west community of Capel, Helen Seiver’s practice explores personal narrative through sculpture, mixed media and installation. She regularly uses found objects and materials, exploring their unique quality of suggesting time, place and era. Making art gives Helen processes to investigate, and a platform from which to talk about the things that really matter to her; be they environmental, political or intensely personal issues. Helen’s artworks often involve long and at times intensely laborious processes, which allows her to reflect on her concerns and concepts. She has a fundamental belief in the strength and power of women that is and has been drawn from the everyday. Her works consider notions of home, repetitive daily rituals, unacknowledged skill, equality/inequality, memory and loss. Helen’s utilises a diverse range of material techniques, including embroidery, welding, weaving, woodwork, sewing and assemblage.
Helen has an extensive exhibition history within Western Australia, which includes shows at Fremantle Arts Centre, Bunbury Regional Art Gallery and Holmes à Court Gallery. In 2020 she received a two-year Regional Arts WA Fellowship Award and is a previous recipient of the West Australian Environmental Art Award. Her works are held in public and private collections, including: Holmes à Court, City of Bunbury, Shire of Mundaring and the Horn Collection.