2025 Artist – Helen Seiver

Helen undertook a one-month residency at New Norcia in the spring of 2025. She explored personal narrative through sculptural form and worked with a range of found objects, including plant matter, discarded tin and broken crockery. Her work responded to the landscape and the context of New Norcia, including the shape of the monastic windows and handmade artefacts within the New Norcia archives to look at the social and environmental history of the site.

Helen 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, in particular matrilineal and site-based histories. The residency gave her time to explore ideas, develop themes and follow up on research gathered in the months leading up to her time at New Norcia. In her own words:

“I took time to walk and think and plan my response to the site. I had an interest in Hildegard of Bingen and her thoughts on Viriditas as a guiding metaphor for life giving qualities (of God’s spirit into) of the natural world. ‘Greenness’ of all that is good and vital to life.

I completed a window-shaped series of experimental small works as examples of ‘Veriditas’, things that also spoke of a sense of place. (…) Daily walking also gave rise to other experiments: in the forest behind the Monastery I came across a tree that had fallen with all the branches, ‘greyed’ and beautiful, still exactly where it had landed. It was like seeing a horizontal ghost tree or the ghosts of people who had walked this land. I brought two of the small branches back to the studio. They had forked ends and remind me of old fashioned washing line props. Reflecting on my lineage, thinking of women’s work, and a familial ‘make do’ mentality, I knitted baling twine around each branch. …

My major project work for the residency was an ‘afternoon tea cloth’: crocheted wire around found pieces of domestic china. It speaks to the female ancestors in my line, some of whom settled in Moora and Badgingarra, quite near here. The work is not only a celebration of ‘afternoon tea parties’ and family occasions but an acknowledgement of hardship endured by many; the women who used the china. 

The last few days of the residency I began thinking and collecting references to inspire work on return to my home studio.  References include white ant eaten sticks, sketches and photographic images of texture and colour of Wandoo trees.  

I’m thinking maybe it is another large blanket embroidery…”

Excerpts from Helen Seiver’s 2025 Residency Statement.

To see more of Helen’s residency and her time at New Norcia, please visit Mandorla social media.