Launch event Thursday 26th April, 6-8pm – Helen Kincaid in conversation with theorist and lecturer Jean Boyd, 6.30pm
“the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
The work in this show draws from a single photo of my mother in her garden in the 1970s. It is an unremarkable photograph among the many 100s I went through after her recent death. Unable to articulate what it was about this hitherto unseen picture, its discovery nonetheless struck me with what Walter Benjamin described as “the posthumous shock”, an extraordinary affirmation of her presence. This arrangement of pigment on paper, this chemical reaction activated all those years ago felt like the light from a distant star – reaching me only now!
The show is a journey into that photograph, a forensic search to uncover what is beyond reach, to ask how little of the image needs to be apparent to derive meaning and its bearing on notions of time and identity. Like the process of memory, this excavation of the image yields up a host of enigmatic fragments and traces to be assembled, reassembled and reimagined, in an effort to conjure up the elusive whole.
Read Linda Taylor’s response to … delayed rays of a star … here
Since completing her MA in 1991 Helen Kincaid has exhibited regularly both internationally and here in the UK. She was awarded the Salon Art Prize in 2011 and exhibitions since then include DATA Contemporary Art Society, London ; Figurines and Asteroids, John Jones Gallery, London; Salon Art Prize exhibition, MRA Project Space, Vyner St, London; Site Arts Festival, Museum In The Park, Stroud; Figurines & Asteroids, INDEX gallery Stroud: Art of Giving ,Saatchi Gallery, London; Threadneedle Art Prize 2015, Mall Galleries, London; DATA Rochester Art Gallery, Kent; ART 2016 London. She is also co director and curator at INDEXprojects, an artist led contemporary arts organisation based in Stroud. In collaboration with iDAT , KARST & fellow INDEX directors she has just completed a project to develop a collaborative space for artists in Virtual Reality entitled corridor, funded by Arts Council England.