Helen Flockhart RSA

Helen Flockhart studied painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1980-85 and continues to live and work in Glasgow. She has held 21 solo exhibitions and has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, New York and Canada. She was elected RSA in 2020. Often plundering the world of myth, her paintings weave the conscious and unconscious, making manifest a fecund world which has a life and logic of its own.

Bill Hare said of her work:
“Helen Flockhart has drawn her creative inspiration from a range of esoteric and mythical sources...Myth is an ideal stimulus for the febrile imagination of the artist, allowing her to delve into a world of profound mystery and intense yearning, where beauty is forever stalked by corruption.”

Daphne is inspired by the myth in which Daphne, lover of woods and nature and follower of Artemis, is pursued by Apollo whose advances she rejects. She entreats her father, the river god Peneus, to protect her whereupon Peneus transforms her into a laurel tree. Daphne is pictured mid metamorphosis with a goldfinch perched atop. Throughout art history, the goldfinch has variously been used to symbolise redemption, fertility, protection and captive love.

Tulip Head is inspired by the story from Ovid’s Fasti of Flora (formerly known as Chloris), whose maidenhood was taken by Zephyrus, God of the West Wind. He marries her and gives her a garden and dominion over all flowering and fruiting plants.