Ash, Mildura Dust, Hailstones by Helen Dilkes
2020
Dad’s white watercolour card, residue acrylic paint, acrylic sheet, 925 silver, resin, pearlescent pigment

Helen Dilkes is an artist-jeweller-researcher based in Wurundjeri country in Victoria, Australia. Helen completed a PhD at the School of Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 2017. She holds an MFA from RMIT (gold and silversmithing), an MEd from the University of Melbourne (visual and performing art) and a BMus from the University of Western Australia (performance).

Dilkes has held two recent solo exhibitions: Geometries in time… slicing the cone at Red Gallery in Victoria, Australia in 2022 (postponed from 2020 until spring 2022) and Time Concertinaed…, a body of works from Geometries in time…, exhibited online during the Radiant Pavilion biennial in 2021. Dilkes has exhibited work in numerous international solo and group exhibitions.

Helen Dilkes’ work explores ideas of duration and multiplicity, specifically relating to the geometry of the cone and ellipse. Dilkes made the neckpiece Ash, Mildura dust, hailstones during the COVID-19 pandemic, following Australia’s extreme hail and dust storms and wildfires the year prior. Dilkes resin cast 15mm hailstones she had collected, dabbed ellipses she cut from her father’s watercolour pad in residual paint from a body of Mildura dust earrings, and used an existing sketch as the basis for 3D-printed structures to support the hailstones.

This neckpiece is a poignant example of Dilkes’ recent approach, which utilises concepts and materials close at hand. Although she has long been surrounded by a home full of a life’s worth of materials, these particular times afforded (and demanded) a refocusing of her attention.

www.helendilkes.com/ IG: www.instagram.com/helendilkes/