Artist's official website www.helendblackbird.co.uk is now online!The Blackbird works in a diverse range of mediums, exploring many issues within her work. Heterogeneous elements serendipitously fuse together seemingly obtuse references within Helen's work. A series of comical coincidences have initiated collaborations with Magne Furuholmen of the artist's favourite band A-ha. Philip K Dick explains at the end of Waking Life, how things he wrote as fiction later turned out to become real events. This has also happened in tao, narrative, dreams, and epistemological coincidences within the artist's life and work. Waking Life is animated in a similar way to A-ha's Take On Me video. Helen's work is a conflation of the imagination with reality, in an odyssey through the temps mort between dreams and reality, as represented by the blackbird. (See the animation below)“He experiences the house in its reality and its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.’ “Through dreams, the various dwelling places of our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way Immemorial things are.†Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of SpaceFor the degree show exhibition The Unreal God And Aspects Of His Non-Existent Universe, the title taken from a Gnostic text chanced upon by Philip K Dick, the comic world of A-ha's 1986 Take On Me video is recreated in 2008, the exhibition space becomes the space inhabited by Morten Harket in the video within the comic book realm, conflating dream like experiences with reality and collaborations with the band themselves, which is a dream come true, and so powerful is Blackbird's imagination that I should not be surprised if, one rainy day, Magne Furuholmen actually came round for tea. In fact, if you click on the following links, you can explore the collaborative relationship with Blackbird and Magne F:Click on this link: http://www.magne-f.net/index2.html then click on the words 'think', 'me.strange', 'casual conversation' and 'shouldn't have to think about this stuff'. Hjelen's doll for Magne's 'Scrabble' Exhibition can be seen here: http://www.magne-f.net/dolls/ Acknowledgements: http://www.magne-f.net/dolls/credits.html For further information, check the blogs on here.Did you pass by on your train of thought without ever being tempted to stop?Narrated by: Gunnar Erfjord..
