Helen Geier

iiiHELEN GEIER
HELEN GEIER
Peter Haynes

1HELEN GEIER
Foreword 2
Introduction 6
The 1960s and 1970s 10
The 1980s 28
The 1990s 46
The 2000s 84
The 2010s 104
CV 136
Dedication 148
Acknowledgments 148
Author’s acknowledgements 149
Table of contents

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Helen Geier has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for more than four decades
and continues to work with unabated energy. To write of a living artist, it is always a case of
work in progress and this monograph, devoted to her art by Peter Haynes, is an empathetic,
insightful and well informed statement concerning her progress to date, rather than a
summation of her art.
Helen Geier is a unique phenomenon in Australian art – she is of her time and place, yet does
not belong to any identifiable grouping or movement – she possesses her own artistic vision
and has devised her own pictorial language.
She was born in Sydney and trained at the National Art School and the Alexander Mackie
Teachers’ College, before travelling to England to study at the St Martin’s School of Art. In
her early work in London she developed a mastery of photolithography and commenced her
life-long exploration of various visual schema as applied to slices of reality. In London she was
in the midst of the Pop Art revolution, where the object was dematerialised and placed into a
new context, rich in unexpected associations. Many of these ideas became incorporated in her
method of art making.
When Geier returned to Australia in 1974 and settled in Melbourne, she was probably the most
accomplished photolithographer in the country. Much of her imagery at the time dealt with
the Botanical Gardens and suburban settings and ideas of entrapment and containment. In
the Melbourne of Bea Maddock, George Baldessin and Roger Kemp, Geier’s imagery found a
receptive audience and critical acclaim.
In 1981 she shifted to rural New South Wales, settling on a property outside Braidwood and
commenced a period of exploration of different systems of visualisation. While never a gutsy
romantic, in Geier’s work of the late 1980s and the 1990s there is an apparent seduction by the
strange beauty of the surrounding landscape. Even in her most cerebral investigations of the
theory of linear perspective, there is an awareness of the sensual qualities of nature.
Much of her art is built around the idea of seamlessly uniting opposites. She attempts to
reconcile the cerebral and the sensuous. She employs Western European spatial constructions
built through linear perspective and those of Asian art, where space is perceived more as an
intuitive form of aerial perspective. She also attempts to unite that which is a product of an
abstract intellectual construct – an artificial visual code – with that which is observed through
primary natural observation.
Foreword

3HELEN GEIER
An inveterate traveller and serial collaborator, a central artistic strategy for Geier, especially
in her art over the past couple of decades, has been to absorb the challenge of the new and
of chance encounters. Her discovery of an eighteenth century handbook on perspective, the
finding of a fallen feather, an illusionistic garden fixture or the accidental spread of ink on
the surface of the paper, become as legitimate as any other art making strategy devised by
theoreticians. She also finds collaboration as a catalyst for creativity, whether this is with the
poet Rhyll McMaster or the Indian artist Kanchan Chander. The challenge of place, chance
encounter and collaboration guarantees that her art constantly reinvents itself.
As a general observation, there is a cerebral toughness that characterises her art – the ability
to focus on a particular idea and to strip it down to its essence – but this is always linked with
the need to make aesthetically pleasing objects. It is this combination of intellectual rigour and
a sense of beauty that gives Geier’s art its special quality of magic.
Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA
Australian National University
8645 Helen Geier 152pp catalogue_June 2016_FA.indd 3 22/08/2016 1:20 PM

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Plate 1
Two worlds, 1997
oil, mixed media on canvas
210.0 x 300.0 cm (diptych)
Collection: National Gallery of Australia

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Introduction
This book is a critical examination of the oeuvre of Helen Geier. It is about pictures and
particularly about graphic and painted works made by the artist from 1968 to 2016. Its textual
emphasis lies in discussions of a selection of Geier’s works produced over more than four
decades. It is not a biography and the details of the artist’s life remain essentially vestigial unless
there are demonstrated connections or relevance on works discussed throughout the text.
Helen Geier’s initial tertiary training in art and art education (1) took place during a period that
heralded the beginnings of a rich and diverse Australian art world that while not eschewing
its past history would in the 1970s openly embrace a pluralistic (and international) view of
art practice, art education, art criticism, art exhibitions, art scholarship and art marketing.
Stylistically Australian art in the 1960s was dominated by painting in a manner that derived
much from European abstraction (in a number of guises) and Modernism generally (2). The
broadening of art practice was accompanied by a range of related phenomena that would
prove integral to the burgeoning art scene. These included a more mobile population than
previously; visits by renowned artists and critics whose lectures and related activities stimulated
local discourse and critical thinking; exhibitions of contemporary art from Europe and America
(3); and the opening of a number of commercial galleries in Sydney and Melbourne (4). Perhaps
the most significant event for Australian art history was the exhibition that opened the new
premises for the National Gallery of Victoria in August 1968 – The Field. The exhibition featured
the work of thirty-eight stylistically disparate artists (including David Aspden, Syd Ball, Peter
Booth, Ian Burn, Janet Dawson, Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks, Michael Johnson, Clement
Meadmore, Ron Robertson-Swann and Robert Rooney) and in the words of its two chief
organisers (Brian Finemore and John Stringer) was:
…not impartial and comprehensive. It is biassed (sic) to define one particular direction in
contemporary Australian art. It concentrates on the abstractionists…and further restricts
itself to…hard edge, unit pattern, colour field, flat abstraction, conceptual and minimal (5).
The art showcased in The Field heralded not only a new turning in Australian art…but also
presaged a new relationship between the public gallery and the living artist (6). It was the first
exhibition of contemporary Australian art by living Australian artists held in a State gallery and
foreshadowed (some years later) the introduction of curatorships of contemporary art and
the establishment of departments of contemporary art across Australian State galleries. The
exhibition’s clear avoidance of any art that adhered to the vague nationalist ethos of (much of)
the art of the 1950s and early 1960s and its equally clear celebration of art (albeit art whose
variety of stylistic and conceptual languages perhaps already signified its future diasporic
spread) that held relevance to the artists themselves marked both an end of one era and the
beginning of another; a cultural shift whose reverberations continue to this day (7).

7HELEN GEIER
Helen Geier began her professional art studies at Sydney’s National Art School in 1964.
Art was however an integral part of her life from childhood. Her mother, Matt Wigg was a fine
painter who was also art teacher at Gosford High School on the New South Wales Central
Coast. An only child, Geier grew up near the Hawkesbury River where her father, Reg, also
a teacher, took her fishing and where a lifelong connection with landscape was instilled. Her
mother was particularly encouraging of her early artistic efforts (an encouragement shared
with her father) that continued through her schooling and later professional life. Geier took
art at high school (Monte St Angelo convent in North Sydney) and as someone not interested
in sport or group activities generally she demonstrated a spirited independent individualism
(a quality that remains with her) that saw the nuns giving her the keys to the school art room
so she could get on with it (8).
Geier’s childhood and the integration of art as part of her everyday world imbued in her a
sense that art and life are enmeshed and art is as much a personal expression of her life as
is life lived. A career in art was a natural choice and Sydney’s National Art School (NAS) the
logical institution to begin professional studies. Her period at the NAS (1964–1968) coincided
with a number of new initiatives. Most important for her own practice was the introduction
of printmaking (etching) by Earle Backen (9), a medium that instilled in Geier what she refers
to as the printmaking mentality (10). By this she is referring to processes that involve layering
and elimination, processes that continue to inform her way of making art. While printmaking
was part of her course at the NAS it was one of a number of subjects with a range of teachers.
Among the latter were John Henshaw (art history), Lyndon Dadswell (sculpture), John
Coburn (design), Strom Gould (portraiture), Earle Backen and Rose Vickers (printmaking),
Jean Isherwood (life drawing), Bernard Sahm (ceramics) and Tom Gleghorn (painting). (11).
In terms of Geier’s later career the artist cites Gleghorn as being an encouraging influence
whose technical expertise was much appreciated but whose own art played no part in her
subsequent development. However Bernard Sahm’s interest in the ceramics of Papua New
Guinea opened new horizons for Geier and saw results particularly in her work of the 1980s
(12). An interest in other cultures has remained a rich source for not only imagery but for
different ways of articulating aesthetic language.
Geier’s comments on her teachers and years at the NAS (1964–1968) and Alexander Mackie
College (1969) speak of the searcher, the individual exploring and discovering that inner
something that she believed was ingrained in her from early childhood and was integral to the
journey that the rest of her life would take (13). This juvenile Weltanschauung was intimated by
the artist’s intellectual rather than expressive approach to her art and in many ways accounts
for ways of making that still hold today. The deductive reasoning behind her dealings with the
motif does not ever deny the physical qualities of paint, ink or whatever medium is at play.
Rather it will allow her to establish a dialogue within each work between the metaphysical and
the physical and thus create networks of references and cross-references that imbue her work

8
with an incisive aesthetic and intellectual tension. Her period of art education was for her a
time of distillation and compilation of technical information that would give her the tools to
follow the path already set, namely to be an artist. This uncompromising position has informed
her artistic strategies throughout her career and has served her well in her continuing
exploration of the celebration of beauty and search for a pathway to (her) inner self (14).
Helen Geier’s art speaks of a finely honed and constantly enquiring aesthetic intellect. The
intensity of her search has led her to examine ways of seeing and ways of looking. She
understands Western notions of single-point perspective and the spatial structure of paintings,
notions that have been inculcated into artists since the Renaissance. They dictate how views
should be framed and how the artist organises the pictorial and structural devices available to
produce an effective transposition of three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image.
Geier does not deny the value of the preceding. Rather she overtly challenges presuppositions
by offering other possibilities in which the interface between subject and object, between
artist and image, is loaded with contiguous readings and meanings. This challenge will be
realised throughout her oeuvre through a range of pictorial, formal and aesthetic challenges.
The incorporation of, for example, non-Western views of pictorial space, simultaneously instils
not only cultural re-location but also cultural dislocation and elision. This clear articulation of
possibilities for felicitous coexistence of Western and non-Western traditions will add layerings
that are not only related to the artist’s formal concerns about the structure of images but
also to the layerings of meaning able to be conveyed within a single work of art. For Geier the
means will reinforce the multiple and coexistent layering of experience that characterises her
search for meanings and beauty.
The complexities innate in the artist’s intellectual approach will be given formal equivalents in
how she will elect to visualise her concepts. For her there is a very real relationship between
how a work is made and how it will be received. Form and content are involved in a conspiracy
to evoke simultaneity of concept, the collision of opposites, the hierarchies of consciousness
and associated multivalent tiers of meaning with the artist will imbue her works. The processes
she will use are as varied as the questions she poses for herself. Painting, drawing (…the basis
of all her work. (15)), printmaking, sewing, folding, collaging and appropriation will all be fair
game. Their selected combinations will infuse her art with a remarkable formal complexity
aligned with an astute intellectual incisiveness, conceptual and philosophical depth, aesthetic
dexterity and a determined beauty. The following chapters deal with Geier’s work through
more than four decades. As stated in the beginning of this Introduction discussion will be
centred on specific works and should be seen as a series of responses to works that have
opened dialogue and that provide further layers in the web of relationships established by
the artist (16).

9HELEN GEIER
1. Geier undertook a Diploma of Art (Education) at the National Art School at East Sydney Technical
College from 1964 to 1968; and a Teacher’s Certificate at the (then) Alexander Mackie Teachers’
College, Sydney in 1969.
2. There are a number of detailed discussions in histories of Australian art that deal with the 1960s that
are relevant here. These include Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–1990 (1991); Sasha Grishin
Australian Art: A History (2013); Patrick McCaughey Strange Country. Why Australian Painting
Matters (2014). Gary Catalano’s The Years of Hope. Australian Art and Criticism 1959–1968 (1981)
deals specifically with the 1960s and is a useful if single-minded point of view.
3. In Chapter 10 (The Art Scene in the 1960s) of Australian Painting 1788–1990 Smith provides a useful
summary with numerous examples of the areas cited.
4. Among the commercial galleries established during the 1960s in (mostly) Sydney and Melbourne key
examples include the Bonython Gallery (1967), Central Street Gallery (1966), Gallery A, Sydney (1964),
Leveson Gallery (1962), Pinacotheca Galley (1967), South Yarra Galleries (1961), Tolarno Galleries
(1967) and Watters Gallery (1964). For a comprehensive list of commercial galleries in Australia see
Alan McCulloch et al The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (2006) pp 1129–1152.
5. The Field, National Gallery of Victoria (1968), p.3.
6. Patrick McCaughey in Robert Lindsay Field to Figuration. Australian Art 1960–1986, National Gallery
of Victoria (1986), p.8
7. An interesting look at Australian art post-The Field that examines that exhibition’s ongoing impact is
Fieldwork. Australian Art 1968–2002, National Gallery of Victoria (2002).
8. All personal biographical material is taken from the artist’s responses to a set of questions from
the author 22 July 2015.
9. The best discussion of the beginnings of the tertiary teaching of printmaking as an art form in
Sydney in the general context of a history of contemporary printmaking remains Sasha Grishin’s
Contemporary Ausatralian Printmaking (1994). This publication also examines the role of artists/
teachers (Earle Backen, Rose Vickers, Strom Gould) who taught Geier at the National Art School.
10. op.cit.8
11. For brief biographies of most of these see Alan McCulloch et al The New Encyclopaedia of
Australian Art (2006).
12. op.cit.8
13. ibid
14. ibid
15. The final two paragraphs of the Introduction owe much to my essay published in the catalogue
accompanying the survey exhibition Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier,
held at the Canberra Museum and Gallery over the summer of 2000 and 2001.
Notes

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Helen Geier’s artistic output in the 1960s involved works made for secondary and tertiary
studies. A single work from 1968 will serve as exemplar for this decade. Moria (Plate 2) was
made towards the end of the artist’s tertiary studies (1968). It is a small work (47.0 x 46.0 cm)
of mixed media on paper. Visually it is dense and layered and arguably tentative in its
accumulation of motifs. However this accumulation of culturally disparate elements is an
incipient example of Geier’s robust questioning (of herself and her viewers) of the correctness
or otherwise of the cultural collisions she pictorializes. The work is invested with a strong
kinetic sense, an almost centrifugal concentration of energies set in motion by the dark circular
form towards the left-hand edge of the paper. This form alludes to African sculpture (1),
but it is a light reference used for both its formal appropriateness and for references to the
importance of so-called primitive, tribal art for Western art at the turn of the twentieth‑century
(I am thinking of course of Picasso’s and Braque’s use of tribal forms on their journeys
towards Cubism. Other tribal citations include dance masks from New Guinea and New
Ireland (art opened to the artist by her ceramics teacher at NAS, Bernard Sahm). Art historical
references from the Modernist Western canon abound and include Wassily Kandinsky, Joan
Miro and Paul Klee. Of these certainly Kandinsky’s and Klee’s highly cerebral approaches to
pictorial language would have had, along with their extensive writings, great appeal to Geier’s
intellectual bent. The overall composition also holds echoes of the 16th-century Milanese artist
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c.1527–1593) whose clever visual puns using fruits and vegetables to
form human faces held much appeal for the later Surrealists. The reference to Surrealism is
moot because there is an overall Surrealist character to Geier’s piece not least because of the
exotic combination of artistic expressions that span temporal and cultural differences.
The composition has a head-like appearance, an icon-like presence whose layered confections
offer important precedents for the artist’s future pictorial investigations. The layering is a device
that while allowing individual aspects of the work to hold a certain degree of autonomy also
simultaneously blurs boundaries and subsumes different expressive entities into the totality
of the work. That said, individual identity is never lost and the variety of cultural sources
remains pointedly clear. The artist’s controlling mind and eye mean that any insinuation of one
element into or over another is a means of asserting her control, of articulating her burgeoning
idiosyncratic pictorial and conceptual vocabulary. The repetition of line, the encapsulation of
sets of lines within (often) architectonic frameworks, the inclusion of strong tonal and formal
contrasts preview devices that will be further explored when Geier embarks on the next phase
of her work – a prolonged (and continuing) exploration of print media.
Following her tertiary training and a brief period of secondary teaching in Sydney, Geier left
Australia in 1970 to live and work in London. In this move she was accompanied by her first
husband, Patrick Geier, a fellow student at the NAS whom she had married in 1966. Patrick’s
European heritage (he was Swiss-French) offered alternatives or additions to her Anglo‑centric
upbringing and opened new worlds in literature and particularly French literature – the realist
The 1960s and 1970s

11HELEN GEIER
Gustave Flaubert and the existentialist Albert Camus were favourites. Patrick took up postgraduate
studies at the Royal College of Art while Helen initially taught for a year at the roughest school in
the East End (2). In 1972 she accepted an offer of a place at St Martin’s School of Art in London
where she completed a Certificate of Post Graduate Studies in 1973. As well as studying the Geiers
travelled extensively in Europe and as Geier states immersing themselves in the art, everything,
we were very focused. She speaks especially of the impact of the absolute perfection of Greek
sculpture and the works of Botticelli (3). Other lasting cultural impressions were the Romanesque
churches on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The totality of these was part
of Geier’s active program of self-education and a reinforcement that for her the artist requires
constant visual refreshment and revitalising to maintain a relevant and informed practice.
The art world in London that Geier encountered in 1970 was one still redolent of the imbrications
of Pop Art, a movement that had its beginnings in Great Britain in 1956 and was roughly
coexistent with American Pop (4). Artists that were part of this stylistically disparate but
philosophically like-minded movement included Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton,
David Hockney and Ron Kitaj. Unlike its American counterpart that appeared to be uncritically
celebratory of contemporary American culture, British Pop questioned the nature of the political
validity of the visualisation of contemporary popular culture while simultaneously critiquing the
modes of that visualisation. This is an uncanny presupposition of one of the primary conditions
of the Postmodern and its espousal of the critique of culture through the presentation of culture
within critically active works of art. Given the direction Geier’s later work would take with its
profound questioning of the nature of making art within confined cultural parameters, one would
be hard-pressed to imagine a more appropriate atmosphere in which the intellectually energetic
and aesthetically adventurous artist could find herself.
At St Martin’s Geier’s first year was devoted to painting. In her second year she returned to
printmaking where she was introduced to photo-lithography by Anthony Deigan, the printmaking
technician (5). Geier found the medium suited her immensely and would spend the entire day
working on prints. Photolithography provided many opportunities. Her works from this time in
England demonstrate the value to her aesthetic maturing of both the experience of being in
England (and variously elsewhere in Europe) and her introduction to a medium whose compatibility
with her ways of seeing and thinking came along at the right place and the right time.
Suffolk House – figure and vanishing point, 1972 (Plate 3) is an intriguingly captivating image.
The duplication of the main image; the insertion of an open linear square in the top image paired
with the same form in the lower image, this time as a square full of filtered colour (notably a
subtle tonal variation of the colour used to outline the upper square); and the demarcating
central band of black, attest to the artist’s use of the camera (Geier was an avid photographer)
and to her controlling eye and mind. Framing in various guises as a means to place the viewer in
relation to the image will remain a potent pictorial and spatial device throughout Geier’s work.
The complexity of the image is reinforced by the subtle layerings of motifs and equally subtle
interrupted spatial expectations. Viewers are introduced into the artist’s mise-en-scène through
the device of the open gate that sits at the left-hand front of the image. It is partially depicted
so that the pictorial configuration of the print falls into the viewer’s space, a clever device that

12
is about ways of looking and how the artist can direct these through subtle and insinuative
insertions. The figure that appears to be disappearing in the top image is no longer present in
the lower one, a visual game that has Surrealist overtones. The use of duplication is a tool seen
in the often used serial imagery of contemporary Pop. Formally the steeply angled horizontals
and linear geometries of the avenue of trees reinforce the reference to Renaissance single-
point perspective. The insertion of a tree towards the left-hand edge of the avenue pointedly
interrupts the latter’s centralising inward thrust. The solid rectangular form of the façade of
the house at the back of the overall image is highlighted by the squares referred to above,
these again clearly referencing the camera that recorded the image but also announcing the
insistent presence of the artist. Colour is not used in a sensuous way but rather as a formal
means of reinforcing the artist’s structural program for the work.
Cage 1 – Figure and Caged bird also from 1973 (Plate 4) is a striking and disquieting picture
with again an imposition of the Surreal in the cinematic juxtapositions of motifs and formal
devices. The image is divided into two rectangles. The upper is a streetscape filled with
menace but portrayed with beautifully nuanced tonal areas and contrasts of green and
blue. The use of stark verticals (a tree trunk to the left-hand edge and a dark shrub at the
right‑hand edge) breaks the horizontals of the street and the vaporous green background
and continues the patterns of making established so clearly in the artist’s career. The upper
image is separated from the lower by a declarative horizontal red line. The lower consists of a
set of steps on which the lies the figure of the artist. Again, the use of horizontals is extremely
effective as is the repeated insertion of tonal contrasts. The figure lies in profile arms akimbo
with light directed onto her face. The natural curves of the body provide visual relief from
the strident horizontals of the layered steps. The formal simplicity underscores an implied
psychological intensity. The artist as victim in some unstated drama is difficult to avoid. This
mood is reinforced by the comparative nature of the two parts of this forensic narrative: the
upper the scene of the crime; the lower the victim of the crime. Pictorially associations redolent
of film noir are difficult to avoid. Possibilities of more personal dramas are also present (6).
Geier and her husband returned to Australia in 1974 and decided to live and work in Melbourne
with very part-time teaching jobs at Prahran College of Advanced Education, and building
up the hours gradually to full time (7). Geier’s time in London enabled her to strengthen
her artistic philosophy and repertoire of techniques and formal strategies. She found the
medium of photolithography especially relevant to her modes of thinking and making and as
Melbourne was the centre of printmaking in Australia it was for her at that time the place to be.
Her dedication, application and carpe diem attitude to everything that she could experience
in terms of her broader art education and practice during her almost four years in London
were such that according to Sasha Grishin she arrived in Melbourne as possibly the most
accomplished photo‑lithographer in the country (8).
Moving to Melbourne was pivotal for Geier’s subsequent development. Among her fellow
teachers were Fred Cress, Jeff Makin, Vic Majzner and Roger Kemp. Kemp was of particular
importance and influential in the way she would view art as part of a wider cultural amalgam.
Kemp’s holistic views embraced music, poetry, literature, philosophy, religion and science as well

13HELEN GEIER
as art. The latter was for him something that not only illuminated human experience but that
also gave coherent form to the universe. Painting was a means to grasp a hidden, spiritual order
that lay beyond normal human interactions with the world. Like artists such as Kandinsky and
Mondrian Kemp believed that art was revelatory of the whole world and offered an epiphany
to anyone willing to believe in its possibilities (9). Geier’s teaching with Kemp opened to her the
relevance to her own practice of the internal and external connections held within each work of
art, of the layered networks that transcend subject-matter and assert the philosophies innate in
ways of making. These were notions that were already present in her work (arguably from her
student days). They were given articulate expression through the conversations that she (and
others) had with Kemp and that were made visible through his art (10).
While Kemp and others (11) offered welcome and intellectual comfort, Geier was aware of
the essential dichotomies in the ways Australian artists (at least those in Melbourne) viewed
their world. She speaks of the division as being characterised by landscape/regionalism
versus abstraction/internationalism (12). Her time at Prahran (1974–1980) coincided with the
results of events in the Australian art world begun in the late 1960s that saw the melting of
that divide. For Geier the possibilities for the celebration of individual expression without
(real or imagined) stylistic or thematic constraints were already with her following her London
years. As always with this artist she was ready to get on with it in her own determined way.
While she taught painting and colour theory she was able to concentrate on printmaking and
photolithography in particular.
A series of works based on Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens produced in 1976 introduce the
landscape into her work. This is not the nationalist landscape of Drysdale, Pugh, Olsen and
others but landscape approached from a cerebral viewpoint. Her landscape although based
in a real place was a landscape constructed, a place not necessarily of solace but of alienation
and displacement. While there may be a thematic dark place in these works, aesthetically it is
a rich place and is integral to the artist’s concepts and for the opening of the possibilities for a
wide-ranging variety of pictorial and formal expressions (13). Botanical Gardens, Gates 1, 1976
(Plate 5) presents a view of a path and gardens in the Melbourne Gardens viewed through the
frame of (part) of a gate. This motif of the gate was seen previously in Suffolk House – figure
and vanishing point but there it was a device to introduce the viewer into the image. Here it
is a barrier, a visual and physical stopping point that keeps the viewer from moving beyond
its decorative serpentine bars. It is also a framing device that directs what and how we see
the other world of the garden that we cannot enter. There is a pathetic sense of something
lost, of a place once known but no longer accessible. The very graphic coiled bars of the gate
are almost silhouetted against the autumnal hues of the shrubs and bushes that constitute
the garden. Geier’s use of colour is thematic as opposed to decorative. Colours perform
like adjectives underscoring the thematic impulse of alienation. This image of non-entry is
beautifully aligned with its formal components. The semblance of a hand-coloured photograph
harks back to early twentieth-century images of places visited and remembered. Geier
creates a unified compilation of visual framing, a real image allied with an abstracted formal
structure and the human implications of the theme of isolation. She achieves this through

14
complex layering whose imbrications hold equally layered and complex meanings. The idea
of connectedness is pertinent to her way of making. For her this involves all facets embraced
in the making of an art work – concept, theme, form, structure, technical means, aesthetics,
internal and external synergies – those shifting constructions that are given clear and persuasive
iteration in this work.
The notion of the implications of framing and the use of dual imagery continues in Geier’s later
Melbourne prints. Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, 1977 (Plate 6) is essentially
two pictures arranged as almost positive and negative states of the same image. Layering here is
both physically part of and apart from the main motif. Geier uses internal layering to imply depth
and indicate various spatial configurations and adopts the strategy of placing an overlay of paper
over the surface of the work to make the metaphorical literal. The top image is dark with sets of
fine black lines arranged in geometrically defined shapes outlined in thick black. The blackness
and striated surface is broken by two diamonds through whose transparent surfaces glimpses of
an almost imperceptible garden can be detected. The space is complex and dynamic with strong
verticals allied to subtle diagonals that push back into the picture plane creating an architectonic
framework in which the space is a formidable presence. Notions of single point perspective are
effectively dismissed in the manner that the artist places the viewer. Are we looking up towards
the ceiling of the building or are we looking through windowed walls. Geier knows that we bring
to the picture ideas of what constitutes a summer house in a garden setting. Our perceptions
are therefore already working as we read the title interestingly placed under the top image
(the signature and date sit to the right-hand edge of the lower image). We expect glass walls
and therefore some degree of transparency and consequently areas of diffused light but Geier
subverts this by playing with the light source.
The lower image is not quite a mirror image of the upper. The starkness of the contrasts of its
light-filled surface with the darkness of the other is overt and declarative. Light swamps the
architectonic framework and while it imbues a sense of the dissimulation of the various verticals
and diagonals it simultaneously drains the colour from these elements and further distances
the viewer. The spaces in this work are alienating despite the openness of their presentation.
The visually dark presence of the top image is separated by a clear dividing horizontal from
its pale and ostensibly fading partner. Geier posits contrasting views of the same image but
then separates them in a pictorial action that gives each pictorial autonomy yet retains familial
taxonomic structures to create an aesthetic and philosophical push-pull that makes meaning
purposefully fugitive.
Geier is an artist for whom confrontations with history, places, objects and people from all
manner of cultures become parts of a store of referential and experiential visual and symbolic
data that speaks of private memory and universal consciousness. For her the past and the
present exist and inform one another simultaneously. These data will appear in various guises
ranging from direct citation to abstracted allusion and each will be invested with a meaning
relevant to its contextual placement(s) and relevant to the artist’s philosophical and aesthetical
concerns. Adam and Eve (Plate 7) a work from 1978 exemplifies the preceding in a number of
ways. The main image is derived from the sculptural reliefs of 12th-century Wells Cathedral in

15HELEN GEIER
England, a place visited by the artist during the early seventies. The cathedral is a beautiful
example of the English Gothic and its relief sculptural decoration remains one of its glories.
Geier has chosen a panel illustrating the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Its
architectural source is clearly evident and the framing of the central image surrounded by
smaller versions of the same is visibly celebrated. The combination and repetition of imagery
results in an overall denseness and visual complexity that allied with the activated texture of
the surface reflecting the complex and complicated deep carving of the original relief give this
work an unusually (for the artist) decorative quality. The insertion of a paper overlay acting
as a curtain to the activity underneath is a theatrical mannerism at once witty and revelatory.
While Adam and Eve holds a certain attraction it also signals that the artist’s formal strategies
so powerfully invested in her printmaking (and particularly in photolithography) over the
decade of the 1970s perhaps needed new directions (14). What will remain and be substantially
developed in the following decade is the tension between the figurative and the abstract and
the formal and conceptual implications that arise from this.
1. I am thinking specifically of West African artefacts such as that made by the Baga, Fang and Senufo
peoples. For copious examples of the forms to which I am referring see, for example, Jean-Baptiste
Bacquart The Tribal Arts of Africa (London, 1998).
2. All biographical material is taken from the artist’s response to a set of questions from the author
22 July 2015.
3. ibid
4. There are a number of excellent studies of British Pop Art. I found the following particularly elucidating:
Christopher Finch Image as Language. Aspects of British Art 1950–1968 (Harmondsworth, 1969);
Mark Francis (ed.) and Hal Foster (survey) Themes and Movements. Pop (London, 2005) and Marco
Livingstone and Walter Guadagnini (ed’s) Pop Art UK. British Pop Art 1956–1972 (Milan, 2004).
5. Sasha Grishin’s Different Fields of Vision (Canberra, 1999) provides a thorough examination of
Geier’s English period and indeed of her total print oeuvre to 1999.
6. ibid.p.8 where Grishin speaks of a possible reference to a darker psychological state and feelings
of confinement in the image of the artist lying prone on the steps. The artist herself suggested
this interpretation in an interview with that author on 20 February 1999.
7. op.cit.2
8. op.cit 5 p.12
9. For an excellent study of Kemp’s art and philosophy see Christopher Heathcote’s
A Quest for Enlightenment. The Art of Roger Kemp (Melbourne, 2007).
10. op.cit 2
11. Grishin cites the example of Bea Maddock as being of importance op.cit.5 pp14–16.
12. op.cit.2
13. ibid. Geier speaks of the presence of an undertow in (her) work.
14. op.cit.8
Notes

16
Plate 2
Moria, 1969
mixed media on paper
47.0 x 46.0 cm
Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale

18
Plate 3
Suffolk House – figure and vanishing point, 1972
lithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper
A/P
Edition 10
60.0 x 46.0 cm

20
Plate 4
Cage I – Figure and Caged bird, 1973
photolithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper
63.0 x 58.0 cm

22
Plate 5
Botanical Gardens, Gates I, 1976
photolithograph, multicolour on watercolour paper
Edition: 20
76.0 x 53.0 cm
Private Collection, Canberra

24
Plate 6
Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, 1977
photo-lithograph, multicolour, paper overlay on watercolour paper
Edition 13/20
30.0 x 60.0 cm

26
Plate 7
Adam and Eve, 1978
photolithograph, multicolour, paper overlay, thread
100.0 x 70.0 cm
Collection: The Artist

28
The 1980s
The late 1970s was a disruptive period in Helen Geier’s personal life and culminated in the
breakdown of her marriage to Patrick and her leaving Melbourne. She moved to Braidwood
outside Canberra to live with her new husband Jeremy Campbell-Davys who she married
in 1981. Professionally she took up a position as Lecturer in the Painting and Foundation
Workshops at the (then) Canberra School of Art (1). The 1980s was a period in Australian art
generally when the impact of a revival of expressionist painting (particularly in Europe) had
world-wide repercussions that included Australia. Painting was no longer dead and individual
subjectivity and the celebration of idiosyncratically original art was lauded. Landscape as part
of a national identity was revived but it was landscape figured in an international mode of
expression that still allowed for individual voices (2).
Geier was fully aware of what was happening. She is never a passive observer but through
voracious reading and visits to exhibitions is always au fait with developments in the Australian
art world as well as elsewhere. Her move precipitated a change in the focus of her art that was
as much informed by the preceding as it was by personal and geographic changes. The lack
of a printing press at her Braidwood studio saw her redirect her artistic energies to painting on
canvas and paper. Her experience of living in a rural environment surrounded by the Australian
bush landscape was a revealing opposite to the urban environments of Melbourne and London
that had been her recent homes. It is important to note that landscape was not new to Geier.
My father was also encouraging…He had a boat and jetty and he was a keen fisherman.
He taught me to row out on Brisbane Waters on the Hawkesbury River and we’d go
fishing. I always used to notice how the roots of the trees would grow over the rocks on
the riverbanks. We’d set fishing traps and we’d use the visual keys of the buoys to line
them up. At Terrigal Beach we had nets for catching crabs and prawns. This all gave me a
strong connection with landscape. (3).
Her childhood imbued in her connections with place that while not overtly expressed in the
preceding decades would emerge as aspects of her thematic and aesthetic language during
the 1980s. Landscape however is not explicitly articulated. Geier prefers to infer its actuality in
her life through subtle pictorial and spatial infusions into the amalgam of devices and aesthetic
strategies that constitute her art. The exploration and re-use of a range of motifs and pictorial
devices continues. Imagery is gathered and gleaned from multiple sources including Etruscan
sculpture, Gothic architecture, Baroque church furniture, Renaissance painting, tribal carvings
and contemporary European and American art (especially the layered veils of colour seen in the
works of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler). While the preceding may be present in Geier’s
work their presence is always subtle and filtered through the artist’s aesthetic intelligence. The
strategy of filtering relates to the conspicuous continuation of the use of framing as a means of
directing the viewer and concurrently controlling ways of seeing. Formally the 1980s saw colour
taking a predominant role along with a rhythmically structured spatial delineation. Intellectually

29HELEN GEIER
Geier consciously creates complex dialogues between the viewer and the work and the viewer
and the artist clothing these in a newly vibrant and energetic pictorial language. It should be
noted however that much that characterises her work of the 1980s was incipient in earlier
work. The aesthetic stratagem of continual self‑exploration provides a rich conceptual, formal
and visual vocabulary that Geier will resort to throughout her career.
Burning bush (Plate 8) from 1980 demonstrates the markedly different approach to her practice
that resulted from her move from the urban to the rural. It is a large (180.0 x 240.0 cm) picture
and announces an early move to making works on a scale that would continue in the artist’s
oeuvre. Framing is explicit and commanding. Its theatrical character is overt and assertive – the
similarities of the whole to a presentation on a proscenium arch stage are clear and deliberate.
The reference to the artifice of theatre underscores much of Geier’s art and her intentionally
cerebral strategies in the formulation of her practice. The titular motif (the burning bush) is
pushed into a central position at the back of the picture plane. It stands at the end of corridor
of richly coloured verticals configured on both sides of a recessive spatial configuration that
creates a deep and constricted tunnel. The spatial constriction is played off against the vigorous
bands of gestural colour that visually create it and in the doing conversely make the corridor a
space of varied yet directed movement. Geier’s skill at creating space with colour is powerfully
evinced in this work. The bush is presented iconically like some form of religious vessel placed
so all are able to view it. Its strident golds and reds are partially reflected at various intervals
along the corridor, devices to activate the spatial journey. Their shocking brilliance stands in
strong contrast to the more sombre greens, burgundies and browns of the corridor walls. The
combination of light and dark, movement and stillness, and spatial centralising versus lateral
spatial spread produces a remarkable instance of the artist’s controlling eye. The theatrical
framing recalls similar ploys utilised by Geier in earlier prints. Colour and scale separate this
work from those however. The play with the elision of the real and the abstract is cleverly
exploited in this powerful and persuasive work.
Along with large works on canvas Geier produced a substantial number of small works on
paper during the early 1980s. Landscape notation. Red earth, 1982 (Plate 9) exemplifies the
characteristics of this series. The incipient references to landscape seen above are given
clear articulation. In earlier work landscape references are often opaque or subsumed into
formal issues around abstraction and spatial structure. In Landscape notation. Red earth the
artist creates through a set of overlaid painterly gestures a dynamic image of an unnamed
topography. The initial presentation is abstract – a compilation of expressive painterly gestures
anchored in an open spatial configuration. This reading is quietly subverted through the
insertion of subtle structural devices that allow for the possibilities of a landscape reading. The
spatial configuration is delimited by the centralising of the image. The overall openness reflects
the space that surrounds the artist’s rural Braidwood studio. It is a reflection of the freedom of
both vision and movement offered by her home/studio and an articulation in their combination
of the physical and intellectual worlds in which the artist operates. The painterly gestures are
fluid and assured and imbue a sense of concomitant solidity and growth that is redolent of

30
the implicit geometries and cyclical movements that are integral components of the natural
world. The artist’s statement is a subtle one. Intimation of topographical form is sufficient and
succinctly expressed in this seductive work. Geier’s landscape generates affinities with the
architecture of Gothic churches that form part of her accumulated repository of images, motifs
and devices. The analogy is as much to do with structure as it is with spiritual and philosophical
connections. The Gothic church is a complex and multilayered building, a place for spiritual
contemplation and meditation. The space though architecturally confined and enclosed, is
a space full of the possibilities for implicit expansion. For Geier the landscape inspires direct
response but its appeal is mysterious, yet simultaneously universal and continuous. The
contrasts and dualities in her pictorialized responses are those same qualities that are manifest
in man’s relationship with nature. The mystery of the landscape demands abstract expression
and Geier’s vigorous new explorations ably fulfil this demand. It is important to note that the
social implications of her graphic work of the 1970s have diminished in favour of her new
relationship with her immediate environment.
As we proceed further into the 1980s Geier’s imagery becomes more visually adventurous.
Between 1983 and 1986 a primitivising element intimates itself more frequently into her work.
This element is not necessarily singularly apparent. It is not dominant. It is rather part of
the artist’s repertoire of pictorial and thematic devices and will be another player in Geier’s
creative tableaux. She continues the dense and tightly massed spatial structure seen in for
example Burning bush in Vertical invader (Plate 10). This is one of a number of powerfully
expressive works from the mid-1980s characterised by thick paint applied in broad gestural
swathes contained within Geier’s dominant centralising spatial construction. The primitive is
one ingredient of many used by the artist to impart an anxious mood, a sense of confronting
the unknown. The central red mass of flames (?) is striking in the vivid richness of its colour.
Its sits surrounded by narrow vertical forms decorated with horizontal bands of colour. These
take on an almost totemic appearance and are the most legible primitivising devices absorbed
into this expressively charged work.
Another of the ways of seeing that Geier places before her viewers is the highly ritualistic
arrangement of the formal structures within the painting. The central form rises upward into
the space but its upward thrust is nicely counterbalanced by the horizontal base from which it
emanates. Behind it there is a darker space intimated rather than articulated but nevertheless
visibly there. The concept of intimation is one often embraced by the artist. It is an essential
aspect of the inclusive ambiguity that she employs so often and with such deft eloquence
throughout her oeuvre. The tantalising citations of primitive tribal art (and ritual) are seen by
her through the eyes of someone trained in the Western tradition. In this work and others she
is exploring, determining the appropriate means for her of eliding different cultural expressions
into her very individual pictorial vocabulary. For Geier partial inclusion or quiet intimation of
traditions other than her own is sufficient. The impact of Western art history on her practice is
always acknowledged. In Vertical invader the impact of primitive art on the art of the German
Expressionists (and I am thinking of Emil Nolde and Erich Heckel in particular (4)) is clearly

31HELEN GEIER
alluded to and adds a further interwoven layer into the artist’s aesthetically and culturally
referential complex. It is interesting to note that while the German Expressionists were (often)
preoccupied with figurative presence in their art Geier prefers to allow her viewers (and
herself) to vicariously place themselves as protagonists in her visual performances. Vertical
invader is a tonally and structurally dense and interpretatively fecund work in which the artist
skilfully combines concerns that have preoccupied her from the beginnings of her professional
career. Its layered eloquence and inclusive ambiguity exemplify her continuing intellectual
interrogation of herself as an artist and those themes and formal means that will best
allow her to articulate those interrogations in the most apposite visual language.
The continuing exploration and subsequent addition of new motifs, themes and concepts
result in the later 1980s, in a number of significant works, significant because of their aesthetic
resolution but also because of their place in Geier’s total oeuvre. Armature (Plate 11) presents
the viewer with a skeletal framework (the armature) of a human torso. This image owes
much to the artist’s interest in Etruscan culture (5). I am thinking particularly of Etruscan
tomb sculpture that she would have seen at the museum in Volterra, Italy that has substantial
holdings of this material. These works are characterised by an enigmatic quality and a timeless
plastic beauty that speaks as much of the present as it does of its own time. The elision of past
and present remains a recurrent motif in Geier’s art. I would also like to raise the exemplar of
D.H.Lawrence’s Etruscan Places, a series of essays covering his visits to Tuscany in the 1920s
and published posthumously in 1932 (6). What is moot in relation to Geier’s art is the notion
of travelling through an ancient culture in a modern world and the ongoing relevance of the
former to the latter. Geier’s Etruscan places are cerebral products as much as they are visual
ones. They display once again the pertinence and all-embracing inclusiveness of the essentially
intellectual propositions she sets for herself to decipher and articulate through her powerfully
idiosyncratic visual language.
In Armature the figurative is present in the main image. However it is a disembodied figuration
in that there is no corporeal presence only the graphically delineated inner shell of a figure.
Despite this there is imbued in this open construction a defiant stance simultaneously
defensive and aggressive. This is given distinctive utterance through the barely discernible
intimations of eyes that stare out from the skeletal helmet. Geier uses her considerable
formal battery to make a marvellously effective divergence between stasis and kinesis,
between passivity and activity that is invested within the coevally existing centripetal and
centrifugal spatial configurations placed within the shell of the torso. The enigma of Armature
is underpinned by the darkly mysterious background through which a range of perspectival
and lateral spatial, tonal, structural and cultural collisions are placed together in a commanding
image of movement and recalled memory.
Fragments in time another work from 1986 (Plate 12) is a pictorially densely packed work.
Layering and ambiguity as visual strategies are overtly celebrated. Geier’s inclusions give
this work a pictorial extravagance that is reminiscent of the richness of Baroque flower

32
pieces or perhaps more pointedly of that same era’s memento mori. In these purposefully
lavish confections dark undertones of the intimations of mortality are submerged but always
present and able to be read by the visually and culturally literate viewer. There is a sense of
that what is happening on the canvas is moving across the surface with a strong lateral pull
to the right‑hand edge of the work. The collection of motifs across the front of the picture
plane includes both overt and covert allusions to primitive art (totems and shields) as well as
less legible but discernibly present topographical suggestions. These are seemingly paraded
across the frontal plane in an energetically rich celebration. The frontal push is beautifully
circumscribed by the strength of the lateral pull. Behind the frontal screen the space, once
again dark, is activated through linear and graphic insertions and sombre tonal area that imply
a deep and recessive space. The surreal implications of some of the frontal elements recall
some of the artist’s earliest pictorial essays and hint at a sense of urgency in her mining of
her visual repository. The multiple relationships between the Gestalt of the whole image and
the various other entities that comprise the whole, will occupy the artist as a major aesthetic
concern for some time. Geier involves her viewers in this process by making them aware of
the autonomy of the component parts and each’s role in constructing the entirety of the work.
That these two perceptual and conceptual phenomena occur simultaneously and on a number
of levels make Fragments in time not just a complicated and demanding work but also a
complexly beautiful one.
In the latter part of the 1980s a return to earlier ways of thinking and making sees Geier
(re-)utilising images and structural devices from the late 1970s (7). Ten years apart (Plate 13)
from 1988 owes clear debts to its printed progenitor Summer House II, Botanical Gardens,
Melbourne (Plate 6). Technically this work combines several media – printed collage, chalk
pastel on watercolour paper. The image is divided into three vertical bands spread across
the paper. The striated background of the earlier work punctuated by the sharply outlined
diamond-shaped windows recurs. The panel to the far left is defaced by vigorous scribblings
that as often are both revelatory and concealing. A flap of (graphic) fabric pushes through the
scribble and adds a geometric strictness to the freeform scribbles. Centrally placed is a faceless
head, helmeted and voiceless, enigmatic in its prison and redolent concurrently of Etruscan
sculpture and the Surrealism of René Magritte. The artist has inscribed across the middle
ground of the frontal plane 10 years apart perhaps a reference to the time passed between
making Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne and the present work Ten Years Apart.
It was also the title of a survey exhibition held at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in
September 1988 (8). It would be fair to say that this is not an easy work. Its meaning allows for
a number of readings each of which holds some validity. I see it as an appropriate end point for
the 1980s, a decade of exploration, discovery and interpretation and a decade rich in expressive
complexity and aesthetic interrogation. It was also as Sasha Grishin reminds us a time when:
Perhaps what was also significant but unknown to her at the time, was that she
was suffering from a brain tumour which was progressively affecting not only her sense
of balance but also her sight and aesthetic sensibilities (9).

33HELEN GEIER
1. All personal biographical material is taken from the artist’s responses to a set of questions from the
author 22 July 2015.
2. There are a number of authoritative texts that examine the 1980s in an Australian context. These include
Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–1990 (1991); Charles Green Peripheral Vision. Contemporary
Australian Art 1970–1994 (1995); Sasha Grishin Australian Art: A History (2013); and Patrick McCaughey
Strange Country. Why Australian Painting Matters (2014).
3. op.cit. 1
4. There are numerous publications dealing with German Expressionism. Stephanie Barron and
Wolf‑Dieter Dube’s German Expressionism: Art and Society (London, 1997) is an excellent overview.
5. For images of the types of sculpture Geier (loosely) references see Otto Brendl Etruscan Art
(Harmondsworth, 1978) and Nigel Spivey Etruscan Art (London, 1997).
6. I used the Cambridge University Press publication of 2001 edited by Simonetta De Filippis Sketches
of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays.
7. I am thinking specifically of Summer House II, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne., 1977 (Plate 6)
8. This was a small exhibition consisting nineteen paintings, prints and works on paper from 1979 to 1988
curated by the author and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essay by the author.
9. Sasha Grishin Different Fields of Vision (Canberra,1999). The brain tumour was successfully operated
on in February 1991.
Notes

34
Plate 8
Burning bush, 1980
oil on canvas
180.0 x 240.0 cm

36
Plate 9
Landscape notation. Red earth, 1982
acrylic, pastel, watercolour on paper
48.5 x 72.0 cm

38
Plate 10
Vertical invader, 1984
oil on canvas
180.0 x 240.0 cm

40
Plate 11
Armature, 1986
oil on canvas
154.0 x 154.0 cm

42
Plate 12
Fragments in time, 1986
oil on canvas
120.0 x 180.0 cm
Private Collection, Brisbane

44
Plate 13
10 years apart, 1988
printed collage, chalk pastel on watercolour paper
59.0 x 81.0 cm

46
The 1990s
If the 1980s was a time for experimentation the 1990s begin with reflection and consolidation.
This decade heralds for Geier a markedly sophisticated and mature approach to her practice.
The cerebral stance that surfaced earlier in her work was invested with a new precision
of thought that would result in some immaculate, carefully structured and intimate pieces
(1). These are not so much changes but responses to internal and external sources that
demanded considered examination (2). In Australia painting had emerged from the 1980s
into an art world that reaffirmed subjectivity as integral to creative expression and celebrated
the individual artistic imagination. That this meant that painting became a medium among
many added to the varieties and diversity of art practices (3). While Geier was fully aware of
developments in both practice and theory she was also fully committed to finding her way
through the maze of ways of seeing and thinking that gave the 1990s its vitality and energy
(and its sometimes confusion). This singular determination to maintain her vision and follow
through her own aesthetic and intellectual paths has been demonstrated from the beginnings
of her practice and continues today.
Two works from 1991 exemplify the direct impact the successful surgery on her brain tumour
had on her spatial perceptions in particular. Raft (Plate 14) is an extraordinary image in the
artist’s response to space and in the directness of her landscape quotations. Geier places an
intricate web of white lines that recede with a dramatic almost violent thrust into the back of
the picture plane. The landscape is spare and desolate and gives the lines the look of bleached
tree trunks scattered randomly through the barren topography. However the scattering is not
random and the formal concentration of the lines in the centralised triangle that cuts deep
into limitless horizon intimates control and order. Triangular forms have been used by the artist
from the early 1980s to imbue her pictorial constructions with compositional unity. Geier’s
aesthetic warehouse continues to be raided. Space is a potent and palpable force and is
powerfully almost threateningly delineated by the artist. The formal sparseness and ostensible
simplicity of Raft belie its conceptual and thematic profundity and emotional depth. What is
most striking in this work is the complete disappearance of the constricted spatial structures
of the 1980s seen in works discussed above. The break is visually and conceptually cathartic
and spells a new beginning in the way Geier will look at, analyse and synthesise her use
of space (4).
Via Regia II (Plate 15) also from 1991, continues the exploitation of the triangle as a device to
visually control the composition and to metaphorically indicate the artist’s controlling mind.
The red triangle is aligned off centre and as in Raft pushes back through the pictorial space
with a determined rigour. The landscape is ominous and empty. A band of interspersed white
lines (bleached tree trunks) across the front of the painting offers a number of readings. The
landscape element is clear as is the concomitant reference to the cycles of nature. Less overt
but nevertheless present is an intimation that the white lines carry a subtle verisimilitude to

47HELEN GEIER
stitching, to the repairing of the land in a crude but effective way. The link to the artist’s recent
medical experiences is relevant as is the association with domestic work usually associated
with women, the latter a reference that will continue to figure in Geier’s art.
Another defining device used by the artist is the circle. Formally it centres the composition
and provides visual focus. The free form rendering of the circle ensures that it can be read in
a number of ways. It is the brain, the container of memories and the fuse for present thought.
It is a symbol for the coalescence of history and contemporaneity, of the coexistence of the
past with the present, and as such a powerful aesthetic and conceptual tool in Geier’s work.
It is also the palette, the holder of the artist’s physical means of expression.
The way of looking in Raft and Via Regia II heralds new directions and asserts the importance
of memory and the cerebral processes that trigger memory as key ingredients in Geier’s art.
This does not deny the role that memory plays earlier in the artist’s oeuvre. Rather it points
to a consciously active and analytical approach to cerebral and physiological processes.
In 1992 Geier created a large (153.0 x 488.0 cm) painting that in many ways can be read
as a sort of visual manifesto of the approaches she uses in the making of her art. Plato’s
Cave (Plate 16) is a philosophically evocative and visually exciting painting. Its sensuous
appeal is generated through the astute use of the opposition and duality of light and dark,
visual metaphors for the philosophical arguments that Plato offered in Books VII and VIII of
The Republic (5). Conceptually the artist is concerned with the contrast then gradual elision
of the world of the senses into the world of reason. Her take on Plato’s work of c.520 BC
embraces his description of the human condition and the need for individuals to discover
themselves through experiencing not only the sensual but more importantly the ideational,
the cerebral. The essential dualities of the inner and outer worlds are expressed in a powerful
visual articulation where meditative and sombre beauty confronts the viewer inviting
exploration, discovery and understanding. Geier divides her work into four rectangular panels
of alternatively light and dark tones. The viewer travels through each panel perspectivally but
this is played off against the lateral pull of the whole towards the left-hand edge of the picture.
The dense tonalities of the two dark panels powerfully capture the state of unknowing that
is the fate of those unable to escape the cave of the title. The darkness is both formal and
metaphorical and its overt contrasts with the brilliant white of the corresponding panels makes
palpable the beautiful coupling of process and concept that gives this work its power.
Geier’s experimenting with varieties of spatial constructions, with space as cultural expression
was given fortuitous impetus by her obtaining a copy of an eighteenth-century manual on
perspective. The copy she had access to was handed down through her husband’s family and
was the sixth edition of Bowles’s Practice of Perspective on an Easy Method of Representing
Natural Objects According to the Rules of Art published in 1782 (6). This has proved an
invaluable source and remains central to her practice not only in the 1990s but continuing to
today. It promulgated new explorations whose end products spoke as much of their source
as of the contemporary world they so eloquently reflect. The images in this book provide

48
a base into which the artist’s multilayered and highly complex aesthetic and conceptual
investigations are framed. The base is not simply a formal device nor an appropriative conceit.
It is a key with which the artist is able to confront new possibilities for the expansion, alteration
and exploitation of pictorial form. It begins a process of pictorial and spatial investigations
imbued with notions of historical precedent and contemporary practice and theory. These
are combined with the simultaneous apposition of the real with the abstract, the organic
and the geometric, the felt and the perceived – the Dionysian and the Apollonian. That this
multiplicity of opposites can occur within the constraints of the imposed grid of eighteenth-
century perspective (constraints knowingly and deliberately imposed by the artist) makes for
a rewarding intellectual and aesthetic journey. The irony of using an eighteenth-century model
as source material for works made in contemporary Australia is not lost on the artist. Its use
also highlights the movement of cultural ideas temporally and geographically and how their
relevance in varying circumstances depends not on the ideas but rather on how they are used
in their new contexts. Geier of course begins from an interrogative position and her source
becomes the basis for questions about the very nature of art and thinking about art and
its materials.
Discussions of a selection of work from the early 1990s exemplify the results of the artist’s
programmed investigations. In Part III Perspective p.61, 1994 (Plate 19) the rich textures of the
painted surface provide sensuous relief to the rigid geometries of the grid and the centralising
square, also gridded. In this work the logic of the theories of single point perspective and its
imposed way of seeing is elegantly subverted by the emphases placed on the surface through
such devices as extensive (and overlaid) gridding, repeated patterning and expressively
applied paint. Colour is richly elegant and is used as both structure and decoration. The
brilliant whiteness of the cage-like central motif is both visual and philosophical ploy to the
density of the background spatial configuration. Visually the contrast is clearly evinced.
Philosophically the contrast is more complex. The background can be seen as the source
of knowledge, as the place the artist (philosopher) paradoxically must be simultaneously a
part of and apart from. It is both enclosure and disclosure. Without experience of this place
knowledge of the next (the gridded cage) is denied. Geier purposefully elides the dualities of
light and dark to express the movement from experience to knowledge, from sensibility to
thought. The intricate visual structuring and eloquent contrasting act as metaphors for the
cerebral complexities so skilfully at play in this work. The abundance of formal ambiguities
reiterates the layered nuances of time, place and (implied) person that populate the entire
artist’s work.
Part III Perspective p.94, also from 1994 (Plate 20) has an overall brightness to it reinforced
by the blues, whites and creams that dominate the palette but also by the insertion of the
frame of black diamonds that surround the central motif. The page reference in the title of
this (and other) works in the series as well as the portrait (page-like) format of the whole work
is a direct reference and subsequent visual quotation of the illustration that appears on the
here, ninety-first page of Bowles’s manual of perspective. That illustration is discernible behind

49HELEN GEIER
another diamond this time decorated with a number of graphically delineated motifs. The
diamond presents as a shield and as well as referencing the primitive shields of earlier work is a
layered cultural insertion onto the linear geometrically defined perspectival space behind. The
outer frame is a repeated pattern of blue rectangles with pale white diagonals activating the
surface. The internal frame of black diamonds has each incised with thin red lines, redolent of
the components of a perspectival design.
Part III Perspective p.110 (Plate 21) is another elegant visual thesis. It consists of an array of
motifs whose source goes beyond the eighteenth-century and speaks of the Renaissance and
the rediscovery of pictorial space and the repercussions of this for artists (7). Across the front
of the picture plane a trio of arched arcades describe pictorially the notion of liner single-point
perspective. They are beautifully drawn, detailed and realistic, and placed within a horizontal
rectangle that repeats the arches and other architectural elements provided by the artist.
Above this trio, also placed within its own horizontal rectangle, sits a more recent building,
perhaps Georgian in the symmetry of its façade. Both illustrated bands sit in a field made up
of nine triangular shapes that imbue a strong sense of immanent movement into this work.
The field is activated by much linear and graphic patterning some of this alluding to incipient
landscape elements. Its soft ochre ground is a pliant contrast to the insistent greyness of
the built forms that sit in it. Contrasts abound as does Geier’s use of multiple and layered
framing. Ambiguity is rife and expressed through multifocused combinations. This work (and
others) may be visually complicated but it is also a complex, a microcosm, layered laterally
and perspectivally, metaphorically asserting the intricacies of cultural accumulations that have
contributed to its making. This work is a paean to the validity of Geier’s searching.
As well as large exercises in paint (and other media), in the 1990s Geier returned to
printmaking. In these the conjunction of the artifice of creating pictorial spatial structure
through a system of applied theories and the actualities of real landscapes is questioned.
There are gaps in the conjunctions that speak of aesthetic and intellectual disparities but it is
the posing of questions about these that concerns Geier. Rather than simple and singular use
of print media in the Perspective series the artist will adopt a layered approach incorporating
for example etching with silkscreen and sewn and folded 3-d. prints. Perspective and Chance
Connections 4A, 1994 (Plate 22) uses the cited combination. It is a crisp almost clinical
combination of theoretical concepts, contrived landscapes and geometric structures. Its
simple black and white presentation contributes to its didactic stance but the clever use of
shading and implied spatial constructs removes it from the definitive to the interrogative.
The over-riding visual character is historical. Its overwhelming message is can the pairing of
the past with the present, the real with the artificial, the intellectual with the sensuous, maintain
its relevance in contemporary practice and particularly in Geier’s practice? The work does not
provide a resolution. That is for the viewer to discover. Geier will continue to explore and in that
exploring produce an idiosyncratic beauty that is more about the question than the answer.
In a review of Geier’s 1995 Beaver Galleries exhibition Experiments and games of chance:
Paintings and prints, Sasha Grishin wrote:

50
Perhaps the most interesting thing is not that Helen Geier disregards the traditional
medium distinctions in art and here combines with authority oil painting, prints,
constructions, artists’ books and mixed-media works, but that she questions the
traditional methods of thought about art, about surfaces, perspective, pattern
and illusion (8).
This is a succinct appraisal of Geier’s early years of the 1990s. The combinations that she so
vigorously makes celebrate the coexistence of the cerebral with the sensuous, the thoughtful
with the beautiful. The validity of Geier’s methods and approaches is strongly expressed in the
enormous variety of highly individualised works made through the impetus of Bowles’s book.
Despite the repetition, recycling and reorganisation of motifs throughout these works there is
never any feeling of aesthetic tiredness. Each work is imbued with an integrity resulting from
the coalescence, interspersion and interlocking of the artist’s vision with her method. The
indivisibility of the physical with the mental creates seamless dualities of form and content.
Geier’s consummately refined distillations of her own experiences onto the canvas become
part of the viewers’ experience of her work. The remorseless ability of her art to simultaneously
sustain inclusivity and exclusivity, to speak of and to the one and the many, clearly places it on
an aesthetic cutting edge.
In the late 1990s Geier produced a stunning and finely tuned series of works the genesis of
which lay in her continuing meditations on culturally conditioned perception. These works
encompass the individual’s collective cultural memory and consciousness and allude to the
artist’s experience of Asian cultures, the Australian landscape and the expectation of how one
reacts to that landscape in both a physical and intellectual way. This is further complicated by
the infusion of an acute and finely honed visual intellect, well read and sophisticated, innately
critical and questioning. The works are again complex and assert the intricacies of the cultural
accumulations of which they are the result. The complexity is analogous to a spider web –
a beautifully modulated structure in which everything has a meaning and a place appropriate
to its role and to the defining mind of its maker.
Dissolving view (Plate 25) from 1997 is beautifully resolved work playing with substance and
ethereality, reality and imagination, through the imposition of slow, rhythmic movement and
layering of a very subtle type. East and West do not absorb one another but operate within
the same pictorial and spatial construct. Individual identity and autonomous activity are
not denied. Geier never permits closure. Visually the metaphor of the screen is exploited.
Oriental motifs float over the grouped avenue of trees, the latter enclosed in a V-shaped form
that could implode within itself or conversely push out of the picture plane. This imparts an
exquisite tension that is played off against the diaphanous veil (the screen) that gently wafts
across the top half of the painting. The sharp geometries of the trees contrasted with
the softness of the veil add another layer of aesthetic tension layer to this subtle and
insinuative work.

51HELEN GEIER
Two worlds, 1996 (Plate 1) is a marvellous visual and philosophical amalgam. The composition
is carefully gridded, laid out like a map or a garden plan. A rhythmic pattern moves the viewer
across and through the tightly balanced work. The central image places eighteenth-century
trees in a twentieth-century Australian/Asian context. The two worlds are those of the Orient
and the Occident. Geier is concerned not so much with issues of Australianness but rather with
wider cultural notions including the collisions and elisions of culture and how these questions
can be visualised. Here the intimations of the coexistence of different cultures are displayed to
the viewer within the confines of a very Western aesthetic mode – single-point perspective.
The display also simultaneously subverts this tradition by suspending the pictorial motifs on
a screen (the grid) that symbolises the artist’s cultural perceptions.
The screen has obvious connections with Asian cultures. It is also an important metaphor in
the Western philosophical canon. It figures for example in Jacques Lacan’s writings where
it refers to the networks of meanings through which we must sift in order to find meanings
appropriate to ourselves (9). It is also found in Schopenhauer’s reference to the veils of Maya
that can only be negotiated by the abandonment of empirical consciousness (10). Maya it
should be noted belongs to the Sanskrit tradition. The concept of movement is integral to
Geier’s art. It is particularly relevant for her visualisation of crossing through cultures. Physical
movement gives individual movement to place and simultaneously impels intellectual activity.
In terms of the artist’s practice process involves concurrent physical and mental activity
in an intimate and intense bond. The suspended screen is replete with kinetic possibilities.
Geier will exploit these possibilities to the fullest in a series of works whose generic titular
identity – Screens – signals this exploitation.
Geier’s graphic investigations continue through the late 1990s. In the eight etchings that
comprise the Expanded field folio of 1998 two will serve to exemplify the aesthetic and
intellectual underpinning of the series. Expanded field (Text) - Plate 28, and Expanded field
(Scroll) - Plate 27, are both defiantly vertical, their verticality repeated in the imposition
(layering) of a smaller vertical panel both into and onto its larger mate. Both use texts
and numbers written in regular lines all over the surface, a regularity broken only by the
interspersion of small panel on larger. These impositions act like palimpsests with their insistent
layering and essentially legible but meaningless inclusion of text and numbers. There is a
quasi-documentary character in these works as they stand as manifestoes of Geier’s modes
of making. Allusions both overt and subtle to Asian ways of visualising the world are again
combined with critically placed quotations from Western pictorial constructs that also infer a
range of possibilities perhaps not even located within the visual parameters of each work. The
influence of Aboriginal ways of depicting country also becomes part of the artist’s repertoire
and reinforces the validity of the inclusion of a complex web of viewpoints in arriving at the
multivalent cultural expression that underpins Geier’s layered and conjoined world view.

52
Screening as a formal device or screens per se have been part of the artist’s morphological
vocabulary since the 1970s. Their expressive importance increased exponentially during the
1990s and they achieved a paramount position in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Fire screen,
1999 (Plate 30) Geier capitalises on the physical presentation of the screen. The work hangs
out from the wall increasing the power of the total spatial configuration and giving that element
an especially active role. The combination of the Western and the Eastern is magnificently
visualised in this work. The screen is overlaid with a series of pictorial devices that play with
modes of perception. The background image is of a red landscape with a river of black snaking
its way vertically through the space. One would think an archetypically Australian landscape –
sparse, bare, unpopulated. Geier though has figured the spatial perception as a Chinese scholar
would paint a landscape. Chinese perspective meanders through the painting in an organic way.
The viewer begins the journey at the bottom of the scroll and then proceeds up and through
the (generally mountainous) landscape in a zigzagged recessional pattern. For the Chinese
artist/scholar painting is an exercise in contemplation. To realise this in the painting the figures
pause at various points to meditate. This internal meditation is also experienced vicariously by
the viewer whose eyes are led through the landscape by the painted protagonist and the viewer
must stop to undergo a process of meditation when directed to do so (11). But the viewer is
not in a Chinese landscape, painted or otherwise. Geier has fused the reality of the Australian
landscape, a reality that is part of her daily experience, with the aesthetics of contemplation
of the Chinese artist/scholar. The red land is patterned with lines and shading that give form
to and visually enliven the two-dimensional surface. It is though a subdued vitality and an
intimatory form. The artist’s purpose is cultural fusion. Another layer reinforces the preceding.
This time Geier employs the stencilled outline of a trompe l’oeil arched garden pergola. The
image is absolutely of the Western canon and loudly asserts the ongoing pertinence of that
tradition for the artist. Single-point perspective is overlaid onto a Chinese multi-directional
perspective. But is it? At first sight, yes. Geier however always avoids the obvious. The reality
is a fusion of all the elements in which no single element controls neither does it subvert.
The artist has used a limited repertoire of colour, form and other pictorial devices to express
a complex idea. That she has achieved this and endowed the result with a conceptual boldness
and accessible aesthetic beauty speaks of the underlying validity and strength of concept and
expressive means.
The 1990s was a rich and fecund time for Geier and culminated in two large survey exhibitions
(11) that pointed to an intrinsic unity in Geier’s work and…invited a reassessment of her standing
as an artist (12).

53HELEN GEIER
1. Sasha Grishin “Helen Geier” in Art and Australia, Vol. 39, No.2, p.268 (Sydney, 2001)
2. The brain tumour and its consequences referred to in the previous chapter were at least for the early
phase of the 1990s paramount.
3. The 1990s is discussed in a number of publications. Charles Green’s Peripheral Vision. Contemporary
Australian Art 1970–1994 (1995) deals with the early 1990s while Sasha Grishin’s Australian Art:
A History (2013) gives an overview of the entire decade and Patrick McCaughey’s Strange Country.
Why Australian Painting Matters (2014) deals specifically with (some) painting.
4. The discussions of Geier’s works from the 1990s draws much from my catalogue essay for Dissolving
View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier (2000) pp.21–32.
5. Through the form of a dialogue led by Socrates Plato posits that the highest and most fundamental kind
of reality is that found in forms by which he meant ideas and not in the material world that is known only
through the senses. An excellent discussion of Plato’s ideas is seen in Stephen Watt’s Introduction in
Plato: Republic (London, 1997).
6. The National Library of Australia has a copy of the third edition of this book published in 1743. The
original of the book was written (in French) by a Jesuit priest Jean Dubreuil (1602–1670) and translated
by E. Chambers. See http:trove.nla.gov.au/work/16780376.
7. Sasha Grishin provides a concise discussion of this in his Different Fields of Vision (1999) pp.29–30.
8. “Provocative and rich in beauty” The Canberra Times, 18/03/1995.
9. For a range of discussions on Lacan psycho-philosophy see Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Cambridge
Companion to Lacan (2003).
10. See for example Peter Laptson’s “Willing and Unwilling. A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer”, Dialogue (1990).
11. For an overview of Chinese painting see Osvald Sirén’s The Chinese on the Art of Painting (2005)
although originally written and compiled in the late nineteenth-century the inclusion of Chinese texts
and the author’s deep scholarship still make this publication worthwhile.
12. These were Different Fields of Vision a survey of the artist’s printed work from 1972 to 1999 curated
by Sasha Grishin; and Dissolving View. The Intellectual Landscape of Helen Geier curated by
Peter Haynes for Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2000 that looked at paintings and works on
paper from 1969 to 2000.
13. Sasha Grishin “Helen Geier”, Art and Australia, Vol.39, No.2, 2001,p.268.
Notes

54
Plate 14
Raft, 1991
oil on paper
80.0 x 120.0 cm

56
Plate 15
Via Regia II, 1991
oil on canvas
150.0 x 210.0 cm

58
Plate 16
Plato’s Cave, 1992
oil on canvas
153.0 x 488.0 cm

60
Plate 17
Part III Perspective p.58, 1993
oil on canvas
210.0 x 150.0 cm
Collection: Australian National University, Canberra

62
Plate 18
Perspective Cube and
Games of Chance, 1994
oil on canvas
210.0 x 300.0 cm
Collection: LaTrobe
Regional Gallery

64
Plate 19
oil on canvas
210.0 x 152.0 cm
Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale

66
Plate 20
oil on canvas
210.0 x 150.0 cm
Collection: New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, Armidale

68
Plate 21
oil on canvas
210.0 x 150.0 cm
Collection: Australians National University

70
Plate 22
Perspective and Chance Connections 4A, 1994
photoetching and silkscreen, sewn and folded 3D print
78.0 x 58.0 cm

72
Plate 23
Interlocking Spaces, 1996
oil, mixed media, paper on canvas
150.0 x 105.0 cm

74
Plate 24
Intersection I, 1996
105.0 x 75.0 cm

76
Plate 25
Dissolving view, 1997
150.0 x 210.0 cm
Private collection, Melbourne

78
Plate 26
Perpetual dialogue, 1997
oil, wax on canvas
210.0 x 150.0 cm (diptych)

80
Plate 27
Expanded Field (Scroll), 1998
photoetching, drypoint, aquatint
72.0 x 42.0 cm
Private Collection, Sydney
Plate 28
Expanded Field (Text), 1998
photoetching, drypoint, aquatint
72.0 x 42.0 cm
Private Collection, Sydney

82
Plate 29
Fire screen, 1999
acrylic, flywire, stencil, spraypaint on paper with sewn thread beads
300.0 x 150.0 cm

84
The 2000s
The diversity that is integral to Helen Geier’s practice is part of the general tendency in
contemporary Australian art to revel in diversity, hybridity, cross-cultural and transnational
tendencies (1). There is a range of manifestations within the preceding and I agree with
Sasha Grishin when he makes a distinction between that hybrid art that explores interactions
between visual arts practice and, for example, biology, artificial intelligence, computer
technologies and body manipulation and the broader mainstream Australian art practice…
where there is a general preparedness to cross media as well as national and conceptual
boundaries as part of a quest for genuine hybrid creations (2). Geier’s art is a comfortable
fit with the latter.
The artist’s interests in the motif of the screen that was renewed with such powerful results
in the1990s, continue into the 2000s. An impressive example is Shoalhaven Archway. Archaic
Threads, 2000, (Plate 31). This is an important work for many reasons. It sums up much of
what has concerned the artist over the previous decade (and earlier), and points to future
directions. It is a beautifully resolved work and as well as carrying intellectual import it is
simply visually stunning. Formal layering as a means for expounding concept is again present.
Despite the continuing use of the same formal devices and pictorial motifs Geier is able to instil
individual identity to this work. Subtle interpolations such as the references to Australian flora
(and thus reference to the wider landscape) assist in defining individual character. Ultimately
it is the overwhelming largeness of the artist’s thematic interests and the openness and
elasticity of her own thought processes and researches that preclude the possibilities of boring
repetition as ever being present in her work. Her art as exemplified in Shoalhaven Archway.
Archaic Threads carries the impressive crescendo of a fugue where all the notes contribute
to éclat of the whole.
Ever the explorer Geier’s continuing interests in historical ways of thinking about how to make
art saw her examining William Hogarth’s classic aesthetic treatise of 1753 The Analysis of
Beauty (3). Like Bowles’s book on perspective, Geier sees relevance in applying Hogarth’s
theories to her contemporary cultural perceptions. In Analysis of Beauty: Rococo gold (Plate
32) and Analysis of Beauty: Classical silver (Plate 33) both from 2000 the artist integrates
seemingly disparate cultural references to create a rich and densely populated visual amalgam.
Travel often informs what will be included in her art and in these works citations from the
bazaars of New Delhi coexist happily with aspects of the Australian landscape and other
devices from her stored memories. That she includes the title of her chief source – viz. The
Analysis of Beauty – cues her viewers into a starting-point, an overriding intellectual starting-
point that is expressed in beautifully composed visual structures. Framing, grids, layering
and ambiguous contrasts are combined in these works to imbue them with pictorial energy
and aesthetic resolution. There is a lot of surface activity and deliberate cultural clashes
are configured throughout. The opposition of the figurative with the abstract and here, the

85HELEN GEIER
decorative speaks of her multiple sources. The vigour of the inclusivity of Geier’s pictorial
language combined with the penetrating insightfulness and intellectual precision indicate
the appropriateness of her exotic combinations. While motifs and devices have a familial
identity there is never in the artist’s work any implication of sameness. Geier understands the
expressive and conceptual potential of sameness in diversity and each re-use instils a further
layer of meaning into the already rich store of continuing quotations.
The continued use of the screen results in some exciting pictures. Pathway to the Orient
(Plate 34) from 2001 is a beautifully complicated composition. Its visual richness is articulated
by the closely set patterning that supplies both depth and moves the viewer into and through
the floating leaves and hints of landscape that wander into the trellised pathway that is the
central motif. Geier’s palette is soft and eighteenth-century perspective theory is subsumed
(but never entirely) by the chance realities of the Australian landscape. Geier’s path to the
culture of the Orient is filtered by her real experience of her immediate landscape and the
intellectual overlay of past ways of making art.
Survey I (Plate 37) and Survey II (Plate 38) from 2004 see the artist engaging with the
Australian landscape and with Australian Aborigine art. Dialogues with Indigenous art have
become a staple of contemporary practice. For Geier it is not just a further cultural layering or
source for additions to her aesthetic repository but a sincere acknowledgement of the ancient
traditions of Aboriginal people and their deep attachment to country. Geier’s own experience
of outback Australia includes a 2002 trip to the Pilbara region of Western Australia when she
was undertaking a residency at the Church Gallery and Curtin University in Perth. This was
the first time she was confronted with the alienating harshness of the desert landscape and
she was overwhelmed by its harshness, hard surfaces, the intensity of the light, the elements,
the climate and the vast expanses in sharp contrast to the intensity of the intricate details of
the landscape (4). The topographical ambiguities and contradictions of the PiIbara ignited
her imaginative impulses and a number of works resulted from the original journey and the
consequent aesthetic and intellectual musings that accompanied it.
Survey I speaks of the infinite, endless horizons of the outback. It also speaks of different ways
of encompassing landscapes so different to those familiar to her within a visual construct.
The viewpoints she adopts accept the coexistence of different perspectives emanating from
different cultural perceptions of space. The rectangular format of the work is divided into
two tonally separated areas. The front is filled with scalloped banks of reds and dark browns
that fall back into the picture plane to be stopped by a horizon line that intimates a deep
space behind it. The upper area of essentially ochres and lighter browns is populated with
the same scalloped forms as the lower area. Space here pushes up from the horizon and
gives prominence to the frontal block. A rectangle of veiled white sits to the left-hand edge
of the front of the picture plane and while visually intrusive it symbolises an alien presence,
something not in tune with the landscape it veils. The combination of differing spatial formats
within the total spatial configuration instils a beautifully controlled aesthetic tension. This

86
speaks of the artist seeking to reconcile her experience of a cultural other in a language
redolent of an already hybridised vocabulary that will nevertheless allow for the contiguous
existence of each of these.
Geier’s distillations are given further unique expression in Survey II. Here a red page of white
text sits on gridded ground (as above of scalloped forms). The text is clear but unintelligible.
On top of it two strange ideograms with primitive overtones are given visual prominence.
Similar marks sit on either side of the text, their presence in a lateral spread across the front
of the picture plane, a strong graphic reference to an (unnamed) but implied cultural source.
Geier may have visited the Pilbara in 2002 but the reverberations of that trip stay with her
and she continued her imaginative researches with powerful expressive results over the next
few years. Geier does not discard but maintains filtered relics of experiential adventures in
her expansive aesthetic repository. In her 2006 Elements exhibition a suite of landscape
images that traverses distance, time and cultures (5) is a persuasive iteration of the potency
of Geier’s expressive and intellectual message. Each image is concerned with the relationships
between the land and the people who inhabit it, either the original Indigenous owners or
those that came in the waves of European settlement post-1788. The narratives are of course
multi-layered and triggered by the insertion of or quiet allusion to, a range of motifs and
pictorial devices. The trigger for this particular series is convict love tokens given to loved
ones by prisoners being sent to the colonies. These poignant mementoes speak of dislocation,
displacement and alienation, properties that Geier will use to highlight the different narratives
that emanate from those relating to the relationship of man to the landscape. The preceding is
of course simplistic and Geier’s imaginative responses offer much more than this. In A World
Away, 2006 (Plate 40) similar spatial devices used in Survey I and Survey II are combined
with a panoramically sweeping aerial viewpoint which embraces tracts of land traced with
sets of graphic contour lines that intimate the swelling contours of the topography depicted.
The palette is light, the lightness only partially relieved by the mid-ground arcs of brown hills.
The intense graphic activity enlivens the overall image but there remains a general feeling of
desolation. While suggestions of Indigenous ways of representation are present (the graphic
lines’ resemblance to the myriads of white lines used in Arnhem Land bark painting is relevant)
Geier also infuses Australian art history in a clear acknowledgement of Margaret Preston and
her 1942 painting held in the National Gallery of Australia, Flying over the Shoalhaven River.
This is one of Geier’s favourite artworks and its influence is clearly present in A World Away.
The aerial viewpoint used by Preston allied with the predominance of ochres and browns in
her palette and the dynamic curve of the serpentine river pushing through the landscape
(a landscape very familiar to Geier) are arguably transposed into Geier’s canvas. If Preston’s
pictorial strategies are transposed they are done so through the filter of Geier’s developed
and mature control of her aesthetic intellect. The inclusion of references to Margaret Preston
has added impetus in her early championing of the aesthetic value of Aboriginal art and its
contribution to Australian culture (6).

Helen Geier

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