Artist Information

to see originals go to www.helennorton.com.au

Self taught artist,  Helen Norton settled in Broome WA in 1985 after 10 years of traveling and working in the Western Deserts in the most remote areas of the Australian outback. At 16 years she left Melbourne alone on a train to Adelaide having no idea or plan of what turned into a lengthy and unusual sojourn. Beginning on the Nullabor plains at a remote roadhouse, she was soon to become a professional feral animal shooter and trapper, stock camp cook, jillaroo, station hand, bronco yard builder and truck driver as well as a stint working in a geriatric psychiatric hospital as a nursing aid. These adventures weaved her path endlessly and consistently through the Gibson, the Great Sandy, the Simpson and Sturt’s Stony deserts for those years.

At 26 she settled (slightly) for the next 14 years in Broome and developed her own well-known style and essence as an artist while continuing to engage with ‘other projects’. She broadened her travels through commissions to Europe and the USA where she nurtured her curiosity and enquiry into the nature of human essence and behaviour regardless of and because of culture. In between venturing closer to home into the more remote Kimberley and Pilbara regions. Here she was inspired by the archetypal and timeless sacredness of the landscape and became aware of curiously felt premonitions of significance in areas later found to be sacred Aboriginal sites, that seemed to not need to be named to be felt and instinctively known.

Much was learned through observing the tenacity, independence and eccentricity of the people within these remote, but basic and material luxury poor locations, which had a richness of experience however that surpassed poverty of ‘things’.  Leaving Australia in 2000, she become an expatriate resident in Vanuatu for 3 years, which led to more cross cultural layering of understanding. She moved to her farm in Queensland in 2003 where she was based while she completed her Masters Degree in Jungian Depth Psychology at UWS in Sydney before moving to Fremantle West Australia with her two sons in 2006. 

Her obvious love of the outback and her curiosity around the human condition is brilliantly captured in her internationally acclaimed work.  Norton’s work smacks of deep psychological questioning. Her obvious interest in this field comes through as a constant challenge to the viewer to look deeper than the first sensing impression.  The works are always “good to look at”, with an emphasis on seduction of the senses.  Perhaps this seduction with beauty assists the overcoming of defenses towards the imagery allowing some of the very complex alchemical messages layered through the work to become available should one wish to engage on that level. Norton feels that its up to the viewer as to how much they wish to get out of her imagery. She sees her role does hold more responsibility than to just serve her own ego in a narcissistic way as a ‘keeper of magical mysteries’ which can’t be shared with others at their own subjective levels of preference and perception.

She is not particularly an ‘artisan’ or interested in art for arts sake and prefers to think of it as a tool or medium for assisting herself and others to find more meaningful and creative the trials and tribulations of the journey of life.  She has often preferred herself as a writer or poet by nature, and does not sit comfortably with the limiting title as an ‘artist’. 
“The reason I have painted is that it has been a negotiating medium for my frustrations and exploding imagination in expressing my feelings, which are often too complex and copious for the word to negotiate.  Painting has allowed me to become an inventor or eternal explorer of reality, and has validated my right to exist as what I am in essence, which has no name. A wonderful tool to permit the spewing forth and then capturing of the otherwise not containable irrational mania through a disciplined form of expression.  I have been fortunate to have found a stream, or outlet valve for this elusive dark place in my own mind to find light and existence in the conscious world, thus saving myself from madness and self-destruction.  As the quantity of this substance inside me is greater than the capacity of my sane self and I could not hold it in, it must be released without causing harm to myself or others.”