Helen Simmonds

As a gallery fortunate enough to be hosting a collection of work by Helen Simmonds, there is a certain anticipatory warmth in the commonly heard remark  I don’t usually like still lifes, but…  It may presage  a short silent moment of chin-stroking circumspection – a dawning recognition that these predominantly small, modest paintings have an evocative or emotive air about them that is not readily describable.  Slow in creation, they are invested with deliberation and long hours of looking, their contemplation engendering a similar, rewarding sense of lasting calm. Slowing down to look is a natural reaction.

The works mainly feature selections from the artist’s collection of small ceramics, bottles and enamelled vessels.  The jug and ladle are recognisably Victorian;  other preferred objects are the oriental porcelain cups and vases, their surfaces decorated with musicians, dancers and temple visitors. These various  objects are, it seems clear, beloved,  imbued with significance as heirlooms or gifts, as well as their whispered depictions of other worlds.   At times the pottery and enamel shimmer among the shadows with their soft china-blue and light orange detailing. Other plates and bowls slice and upset the background  hush with a humming crescent or blazing splash of irridescent saffron glaze.

Simmonds’ studio is a bright attic overlooking a townscape criss-cross of rooftops.  The Marlborough Downs are visible in the distance and the chatter of workers on a break audible outside the window.  Within this capsular space the ceramics and flowers are slowly choreographed into her familiar compositions. Behind the closed studio door she comes to terms with the outside world’s restlessness  and bustle, making  peace with it through the hard-won discipline and freedom of painting.  She is the epitome of Girogio Morandi’s description (of himself) as ‘ essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.’ 

Despite its long intertwining with the history of art and its currents of wealth, religion, patronage and power, still life is perhaps overly-familiar as a genre in our noisy world and is too often served cold and hyper-real.  We have evolved in terms of medium, subject matter, concept.  It is the antithesis of our voracious, image-hungry zeitgeist.  Why contemplate and get to know the depiction of simple objects within an arms-length of space on a table, when one can instead binge on a knowing and graphic digital firmament.

It is this that makes an artist like Helen Simmonds a revolutionary.  We are looking at a quest for, if not an exercise in, equanimity and her work leads us, rapt, into silence.  Simmonds is capable of  re-enchanting the everyday ordinary utensil, revivifying and suspending for us the short precious life-span of a beautiful flowering plant.  To look at this work is to be guided from a viral, hurried world to a simple non-knee-jerk, non-reductive essence, aptly summed up  by writer Patrick McGuinness.  Less is not always more. Sometimes it is everything.