Helen Teede

Cocoon
​
First Floor Gallery - Harare

​​Pablo Picasso once famously said “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.”[1] and elsewhere that “Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.”[2]
Great artists recognised the razor’s edge upon which they walked as artists, to have the vulnerabililty and emotional porousness to be “a receptacle” of all things and the immense fortitude required to wrangle with the responsibility of creating ‘lies’ which makes us realise the truth.
 
Maintaining this excruciating equilibrium is no less than a daily Sisyphean task, because no artist’s work is ever completed or genuinely gets easier. How could it? Once the burden of rolling that boulder up a hill is complete, once a painting is finished an exhibition is realised, one is back to a studio to contend with the abyss of the empty canvas.
 
In Cocoon, Helen Teede in many ways lifts a curtain a little to let the audience in on the drama of that process, the fragments of the artist’s world entering into the exhibition the environment the inspirations, human, mineral, animal, the physical world and emotional state. We see a body of work in motion in real time of evolution from ‘Research’and ‘Gaze’to deeply held personal sentiments embodied in ‘Stone Circle’ and ongoing ruminations on subjects carried on from prior experiences such as ‘Ca la Faremo 2’ and ‘Tempest 2’.
 
We also see arrivals at some new ideas as in ‘Cocoon’ and ‘Feral Girls’ both suites of works hazy ruminations which resist yielding their true essence, as well as pure experimentation and fun with ceramics in ‘Homage to Camoni’, ‘Initiation’and ‘Eclipse’which land in the show as seashells on the beach, a gift that we are able to enjoy because something has built that capacity in us.
 
All these elements are brought together in a scenography and installation which have been fermenting in Teede’s thinking around ideas of anthropology, mysticism and connectedness with the environment over the past decade.
 
Teede’s Cocoon, this is the closest thing we can experience of an artist’s body of work genuinely as a body – complex, elemental, fluid and temperamental, with limbs and organs serving different purposes, suffused by currents and connections difficult to categorise or segregate, memories and emotions, vulnerable yet resolute. It is a magical world, entirely made up after all it is just canvas, just pigment, just clay, just rocks, just steel and yet stepping into that world makes each of us know something undeniably true.

Valerie Kabov
©2023

[1]Alfred H. Barr Jr. Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (1946) (www.oxfordreference.com Pablo Picasso)
 
[2]Dore Ashton Picasso on Art (1972) ‘Two statements by Picasso’ (www.oxfordreference.com Pablo Picasso)

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