Researching - Helen Sear. (Manipulated Images)

Helen Sears Photography has progressed from a fine art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980s. Her work combines vision, touch and the nature of experience, particulary being interested in landscape in relation to humans and animals. She uses drawing, lens based media and didgital technologies. She has had work displayed in many galleries as well as solo exhibitions. She is at the moment Reader in Photography and Fine Art Practice as well as a member European Centre for Photographic Research at the University of Wales Newport. She is based in Raglan, Wales.

Some of her work was influenced William Henry Fox Talbot, who placed black lace onto sensitised paper and exposed it to the sun. The lace then appeared white on a dark background. He called this technique 'Photogenic Drawing'. She uses some of Fox Talbots technique within the body of work known as 'Inside the View'.

In her solo show 'Inside the View' 2005, she mixes together formal landscape and portraiture and then alters the surface of each image using digital erasure so that the picture appears to have a delicate lace work and this is hand drawn in the computer. These works are very etherial and romantic and touch the viewers psyche. The photos seem to have an almost spiritual overtone.

Sears more simpler work, where she restrains herself from too much didgital enhancement tend to be more meaningful as when she has used too many layers and references the point of the pictures tend to be lost.

She won the Creative Wales Award which will help her to develop he photgraphy practice. She will be developing ideas concerning landscape which changes dramatically through land management and will also be doing a portrait of a field and its change over a period of a year.

Sears is absorbed with culture, methology, nature and technology.

Taken from the Series 'Inside the View' 2004 - 2008

This picture involves two screens, the computer screen in which she draws the lace and the photographic layer. The effect is almost that the person in the photo is ourselves viewing the landscape. It is aesthetically pleasing while also having a certain sublime attribute. The women that we see are not wholy in the space but are almost a ghost of ourselves.

Taken from the series 'Beyond the View' 2009 - 2010

Whereas 'Inside the View' were 34x34cm, 'Beyond the View' is 110x110cm and this allows the viewer to see the image behind appear inside the erased line of the top image. Because of this change of scale there are also two different viewing distances. The landscapes are more detailed and the underlying image more obvious as it is pulled through to the surface of the image.

Helen Sears is very innovative which makes her very important in this field. She doesn't use filters or patina but tends to use software like an archeological site whereby layers can be pulled through one another to alter a conventional perspective. In both of the bodies of work I've discussed the composition is similar having the background and the foreground with the womans head sandwiched between both of these. These works are viewed within galleries. The reason that I like this work is because I would like to use a similar technique in my manipulated images task. This style invites the reader to ellaborate the picture with their own ideas and fantasies.