HELEN BUR
A place, be it a neighbourhood, a city or a country, is shaped by the people who inhabit it. It is with this premise that Helen Bur approaches her work in Circular.
In the form of a catalogue or portrait of San Cristóbal, the artist represents 20 people from the neighbourhood in 16 small works reflecting the diversity and life of this area. The artistic process consists of walking around the streets and squares of SanCris in a spontaneous and winding way, and so finding by chance those neighbors who will serve as involuntary models, as well as those corners and hidden spaces where the paintings will be made.
Day after day the artist paints these people: young and old, men and women, often in costumes suggesting different cultures and origins. The people portrayed always appear with their backs turned, in order to preserve their anonymity but also to allow other people to identify with them. In the early days of her stay, Helen's activity provokes some suspicion or surprise "who is she? what is she doing?", but little by little word spreads in the neighborhood: "a British artist is painting people from the neighborhood in the streets" and people approach her, try to communicate with her and, of course, ask to be portrayed. Helen has succeeded in creating a good atmosphere in the neighborhood, a positive feeling of belonging, and she has done it in an apparently simple way, as it is the way people appear painted by her hands, her brushes, her pigments and her palette, which she creates from only 5 colours. A kind of magical process in which the people of a place on the margins are given value.
HELEN BUR (UNITED KINGDOM)
Her work, both in small and large format, focuses on people, their emotions, their social and human position in the world and the changes that occur in the course of life.