We are incredibly excited to announce Helen Denerley’s fifth solo exhibition in Kilmorack Gallery. In this exhibition, Salvage, Denerley has taken extra delight in her scrap pile, creating wonders that still amaze me: from giant spiders and infinity columns, to the smallest bird and bee.
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extract from catalogue
Salvage has come together with the sort of great leaps only an artist with a lifetime sculpting experience can conjure. It is in many ways Helen Denerley’s Everest, a peak, in her output and at a time when most see the fragility in the natural world around us. Many also feel an affinity with the creatures she sculpts and we share the Earth with: the butterflies and pollinators that Denerley forms from discarded bicycle parts, springs and the now jewel-like screwdriver blades, the gentle grazing goats made from ploughshares, a graceful flying red kite magicked from discarded scythe blades and small birds from old spoons. Here is a resurrection rising from things we throw away too quickly.
Denerley tackles spiders too. A giant one, which dares us to walk under it to share its space. For a moment, as we step below its abdomen, our roles are reversed. We are now vulnerable, the ones at the mercy of the natural world. Scale in art always has an unavoidable power. Sculpture as large as a three-meter-high spider, or a 6.5m high infinity column, will always connect us with a larger world, with the infinite. When we lift our eyes to the top of an infinity column - Denerley’s or Brancusi’s, we are forced to look up towards an endlessly expanding space and the heavens - and to consider our relative size in time and space.
The very small is included in this exhibition too. Denerley’s three bumblebees can be held in the palm of one hand. Honeybees, possibly the best-known pollinator and often brought to orchards in hives to aid our harvests, show how often the smallest can be the most important, but they are at threat from habitat loss, pesticides and disease. We cannot let them suffer. Denerley’s bees have distinct faces and characters and their importance is equal to the greatest creature.
One of Denerley’s recent obsessions is making chess sets. There are sculptural reasons for this. Chess’s thirty-two pieces allow repetition and patterns to form, and this is one of the great joys of sculpture. Bishops, queens, pawns, knights and kings also allow a symbolic imagination to spark. They force us to look at each piece in turn and think about what it is now, what it once was and the move to be made. And when playing, when we touch the work, it becomes more than sculpture on a plinth. Chess is of course the great game. In chess, the move must come and eventually there will be a winner. An earlier chess set had two sides: conservationists and traditional game estates. Current chess sets reuse keys, sparkplugs, meat grinders, old drills and other found items. It is a challenge that rises out of her scrap pile.
The most emotive sculpture in ‘Salvage’ and the one used on the cover of this publication are the orangutans. We are like them in most ways. They are a little smaller and a bit longer limbed from living mostly in the trees, but looking at an orangutan mother and child is like looking at our better, most caring selves. In Malay the word ‘orang’ translates as person and ‘hutan’ forest. They are people of the forest. We are people from somewhere else. Look closely and you see how much Denerley has felt and conveyed their primate essence into these pieces. The young orangutan, with his small soft ears and wary eyes, sits safely with his mother. He rests on her strong arm with his long fingers across her knee and his foot on hers. Mother is a protective shell around him: intelligent eyes, hands like ours and with a skeleton recognisable both in its past component life and from ourselves. We see through them, through the negative space which animates the work. This creates a ghost-like quality, making them more precious still. All Denerley’s work has this transient quality, but because they are so like me, they feel even more of a caught moment, a rare glimpse of a vanishing or arriving in the world. They make me look at myself and ask questions. How much like them am I, and the butterflies, goats and spiders too? And how much life lies in a small space? All these creations have risen from a scrap pile on a remote Aberdeenshire hillside. What beauty lies in largest, smallest and most discarded thing.
