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Helena Bezzina

Dr Helena Bezzina 

Artist, Art Therapist, Educator and Researcher 

 

I am an artist, art therapist, educator and researcher. Based on Awabakal and Worimi country, I draw on my art practice as research in the field of Health and Wellbeing. I received a Bachelor of Arts from COFA University of NSW and work with mixed media with a focus on drawing and ink work. 

 

Working in interpretive programming within museums and galleries for over fifteen years provided me with firsthand experiences of the positive transformative effects of viewing, making, and discussing art. This experience, along with working with seniors living with Alzheimer's and youth with mental health issues, has motivated me to focus my current art-led research as an inquiry into the role of museums and galleries as potential sites for mental health and wellbeing. My art practice is intuitive, and inquiry based, and I draw on art as an alternate way of knowing, exploring concepts and ideas through mark making.   

New and Archival Works From the Studio 

The recent phenomena of Zoom inspired my work during the ongoing COVID pandemic. I have easily spent over 5 hours a day with work, social and community meetings on zoom. This is an experience I have chosen to explore in this current project, Zoom Gardens. Drawing on a phenomenological approach, I focus, through drawing, on the connections we established as we function within this living garden, tending to each other, together side-by-side, but essentially alone. Drawing is cathartic; it allows me to focus and look again, connecting me to the luminous figures within zoom, a liminal in-between space, this zoom garden.  

Zoom Gardens

Unquiet 

These drawing are inspired through a search for meaning in an attempt to reconcile an ambivalent relationship to being here on earth because my relationship with the environment is currently very difficult or powerless. This searching for meaning through drawing practices sits well within art therapist Skaife’s (2001) theorising on the intersubjective focus and the centrality of the body in making meaning.  Skaife considers art-based processes as making visible what is hidden. Skaife believes drawing can bring attention to the way in which we come to see or make meaning of the world. 

Four images: Unquiet, mixed media 1 to 4 2023 

Helena Bezzina

In the spirit of reconciliation, Helena Bezzina acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today and everyday.

© 2035 by Helena Bezzina. Created by Adlib Creative

I.D. Series of self-portraits. 

These works focus on the process of mark making to both interrogate self and society. 

I draw on the therapeutic benefits of drawing, adhering to André Breton’s practice of ‘auto drawing’ to access the unconscious (1933). I am not interested in mimesis or looking for a surface resemblance, but rather grasps at the inner state of my psyche or to draw what cannot be put into words.