Helen Elliott
Recycled, 2006
porcelain enamel on steel/wood mounted
20 x 20 x ^3/4"

In her most recent work Helen Elliott is inspired by the architecture of the Jamaican landscape.  The visual imagery of the tin shacks and other structures that are often located on the sides of the roads in Jamaica has motivated Elliott to do a series of works that act like a metaphor for her feelings of ‘uprootedness’ and displacement as an immigrant to the US. Elliott’s innovative and original technique of using porcelain enamel on steel makes her a pioneer in medium in the international contemporary arts. Elliott’s works are about pieces of things coming together to form habitat or home.  They offer subtle color gradations and sublime views.  At the same time they involve severe juxtapositions and aggressive layering, revealing the often complex inner mechanisms of an ever evolving cultural ‘hybridity’ trying to find enough space under the same ‘roof’.  In 1988 Elliott received the Ohio Arts Council Fellowship and in 2002 she was awarded the one percent public art commission for Lakeland Elementary Middle School in Baltimore. Helen teaches and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

 “I am fascinated by the creativity, by the adaptability of the wayside structures on the sides of the road in Jamaica. The people who make them are often on land that doesn’t even belong to them – and then the owner of the land comes for the land to re-develop or whatever – and then they knock down these structures and the people move on. That whole phenomenon relates to my whole experience as an immigrant in the United States.”