Helen Braider

Art emerges from play with materials of no apparent value (paint, a lump of stone, a rough log, a scrap of wood found on a trail) transforming them to tell a story or to speak of a truth. I might be drawn to the absolute presence of a block of stone and rework it to evoke a quiet moment suspended in space and time, held in a soft skin countered by the rough natural surface. Because I revel in the real, the actual, the tangible, I like to take the objective presence of a plain log of wood or a block of stone or a piece of paper pass it through a filter of traditional formalism, be it primitive, classical, gothic, or baroque, and then stream it again through my own sensibility, shaped by minimalism and abstract expressionism, to find at last a graceful gesture, curve, or line. Above all, I delight in the scrap of wood, a tiny carved figure, the paper to be molded around the piece of plywood which can in turn be pierced or layered.