Hb | Upfest

Hb

Hb / Helen Bur is a British artist currently working between Berlin and the UK and was also co-director for the Empty Walls street art festival (Cardiff). She works across canvas, paper and walls using digital collage as a starting point and embraces paintings ability to provide a contemporary social narrative.

Control and Manipulation are the current overarching themes in her practice, sourcing imagery from the mass media, news stories, algorithms spouting world weariness and the endless downward scroll of the news feed. She is interested in how this over-saturation and juxtopostion of imagery and information leaves us in a state of confusion or disconnection where our own narratives about our reality are subconsciously formed, creating a position of daily surreality as the norm. The play between information and absurdity, commentary and narration, figuration and abstraction provide a delicate ground for the work, allowing paintings capacity to slow down the way in which we process imagery to providing a moment of quiet and stillness, inviting the eye to linger.

Art work by Hb