Following her attainment of a first-class undergraduate degree in painting at the Glasgow School of Art in 1984, Helen Flockhart took up postgraduate study with the British Council at the State Higher School of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland. Boasting an impressive resume of solo exhibitions, spanning both Scotland and England, as well as group shows in New York, Ontario, Rotterdam, London and Truro, Flockhart was awarded the Concept Fine Art Award (2016), the Royal Scottish Academy’s Maude Gemmel Hutchinson Prize (2012), and the Lyon and Turnbull Award presented by the Royal Glasgow Institute (2012).
Bill Hare, teaching fellow of Modern and Contemporary Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh, praises her work. ‘Nobody paints like Helen Flockhart’, he writes: ‘here the mundane and the mythical are at one with each other’.
Hers are works which break with established convention -- a blend of portrait and landscape, Flockhart’s paintings are verdant, fantastical paeans to that particularist genre of British myth making centered on pastures, mountains and divinity. Indeed, there is something Blakean about her work -- a warmth of vision borne of what appears simultaneous ancient and modern.
