Helen Beard (b. 1971, Birmingham, UK) studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design and went on to have a fifteen year career as an assistant art director in the film industry. During this time, Helen continued with her artistic practice, working in the diverse mediums of paint, collage and needlepoint.

Offering immersive landscapes of bodies curved and intertwined, painted in polychromatic swathes of distinctive brushstrokes, Beard reduces figures to vibrant fields of colour. With a thick application of paint, Beard creates rich, visceral textures that mimic soft contours of skin, inciting the viewer’s sense of touch. As a result, the imagery, though sourced from pornography, is anything but crude.