Cockatoo Gallery sells and promotes Helen Norton artwork.

ARTIST INFORMATION

Self taught artist,  Helen Norton settled in Broome WA in 1985 after
10 years of travelling and working in the Western Deserts in the
most remote areas of the Australian outback. At 16 years she left
Melbourne alone on a train to Adelaide having no idea or plan of
what turned into a lengthy and unusual sojourn. Beginning on the
Nullabor plains at a remote roadhouse, she was soon to become a
professional feral animal shooter and trapper, stock camp cook,
jillaroo, station hand, bronco yard builder and truck driver as well
as a stint working in a geriatric psychiatric hospital as a nursing aid. These adventures weaved her
path endlessly and consistently through the Gibson, the Great
Sandy, the Simpson and Sturt’s Stony deserts for those years.

At 26 she settled (slightly) for the next 14 years in Broome and
developed her own well-known style and essence as an artist while
continuing to engage with ‘other projects’. She broadened her
travels through commissions to Europe and the USA where she
nurtured her curiosity and enquiry into the nature of human essence
and behaviour regardless of and because of culture. In between
venturing closer to home into the more remote Kimberley and
Pilbara regions. Here she was inspired by the archetypal and
timeless sacredness of the landscape and became aware of
curiously felt premonitions of significance in areas later found to be
sacred Aboriginal sites, that seemed to not need to be named to be
felt and instinctively known.

Much was learned through observing the tenacity, independence
and eccentricity of the people within these remote, but basic and
material luxury poor locations, which had a richness of experience
however that surpassed poverty of ‘things’.  Leaving Australia in
2000, she become an expatriate resident in Vanuatu which led to
more cross cultural layering of understanding. She now lives on
her small and very green farm in Queensland with her two sons. 

Her obvious love of the outback and her curiosity around the
human condition is brilliantly captured in her internationally
acclaimed work.  Norton’s work smacks of deep psychological
questioning. Her obvious interest in this field comes through
as a constant challenge to the viewer to look deeper than the first
sensing impression.  The works are always “good to look at”, with
an emphasis on seduction of the senses.  Perhaps this seduction
with beauty assists the overcoming of defences towards the
imagery allowing some of the very complex alchemical messages
layered through the work to become available should one wish to
engage on that level. Norton feels that its up to the viewer as to
how much they wish to get out of her imagery. She sees her role
does hold more responsibility than to just serve her own ego in a
narcissistic way as a ‘keeper of magical mysteries’ which can’t be
shared with others at their own subjective levels of preference and
perception.

She is not particularly an ‘artisan’ or interested in art for arts sake
and prefers to think of it as a tool or medium for assisting herself
and others to find more meaningful and creative the trials and
tribulations of the journey of life.  She has often preferred herself
as a writer or poet by nature, and does not sit comfortably with
the limiting title as an ‘artist’. 

“The reason I have painted is that it has been a negotiating medium
for my frustrations and exploding imagination in expressing my
feelings, which are often too complex and copious for the word to
negotiate.  Painting has allowed me to become an inventor or eternal
explorer of reality, and has validated my right to exist as what I am in
essence, which has no name. A wonderful tool to permit the spewing
forth and then capturing of the otherwise not containable irrational
mania through a disciplined form of expression.  I have been
fortunate to have found a stream, or outlet valve for this elusive dark
place in my own mind to find light and existence in the conscious
world, thus saving myself from madness and self-destruction.  As
the quantity of this substance inside me is greater than the capacity
of my sane self and I could not hold it in, it must be released without
causing harm to myself or others.”