Helen Ivory

Hear What the Moon Told Me Helen Ivory

'Stepping out of a limousine designed by Joseph Cornell into a cosmos of its own, Helen Ivory presents us with a world where the apparently ordinary meets the enchanted and the haphazard. And that is precisely where the magic and tension lie.'




- George Szirtes




'What's remarkable in these pieces is how much the words are needed. How much the cumulative effect of words is needed. And that there are no howlers, dissonances, or bum notes, among the phrases. The art on show here is often working with both broad sweep (of bold colour) and anatomical fascination as close-up as a mouse having a sniff; at risk in its magical access to a whole level of detail and brutal reality.




The words are needed not to complete, or tidy, the images. They are needed because here is a practitioner who needs to assemble and make visual images, and who needs to set a project in motion that releases messages and tones: it's not, in other words, about cutting up books in order to say how stupid or arbitrary all language is. No, it's finding a voice. (Not the voice).'




- Ira Lightman




'Delightfully odd fragments of text carefully teased from long-forgotten books and reconstructed with serendipitous aplomb. Helen Ivory's enchantingly evocative visual poetry creates unexpected and engaging text and image combinations while celebrating the well considered absence of the material left behind.'




- Graham Rawle