In a project curated by Ffotogallery and commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales, Helen Sear was chosen as the artist to represent Wales at the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2015.

Presented in Venice during my time as Ffotogallery’s Director, with an accompanying publication and engagement programme, I had the role of Project Director for Wales in Venice 2015 having enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the artist, previously publishing Helen Sear’s thirty-year retrospective monograph Inside The View in 2012, and exhibiting her work on several occasions both internationally and in Wales.

Her exhibition in Venice ‘…the rest is smoke’ featured a suite of five new works, both rooted in the local and familiar landscapes of Wales, and responding to the wider context of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition was housed in the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, a church and former convent in the Castello area of Venice.

The title of Helen Sear’s exhibition is taken from an inscription in Mantegna’s last painting of St. Sebastian, now housed in the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice: Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus.

Ideas of mortality and temporality were explored through a series of new works in which agricultural landscapes marked for production and consumption are seen to exist simultaneously as magical spaces, imprinting themselves on the body and mind of the viewer. Sear’s photographic and video works explore the image as sculptural form whereby the artist integrates different speeds of looking, contrasting physical scale, colour and vivid material presence. The works resonated strongly with each other and with the architectural site of the exhibition.

Helen Sear was the first female artist to be selected for a solo exhibition for Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice. Known as one of Wales’ most significant contemporary artists, Helen Sear continues to explore sensory ideas and expressions, vision, touch, and the re-presentation of the nature of experience with particular reference to the human and animal body and her immediate environment in rural Wales and France. Since moving to Wales in 1984, the artist has continued to exhibit and teach in Wales and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions in Quebec, Canada, New York and Stuttgart.