153cm x 102cm

Oil on Canvas

Helen S. Tiernan, born in Sale Victoria has recently moved to Fish Creek from Canberra. She says she has come home.. Of Irish /Indigenous heritage a honours graduate from the Australian National University’s (ANU) Canberra School of Art has distinguished herself as a painter of considerable eloquence, technical virtuosity, irreverence and humor, whose work stands at the forefront of Indigenous identity art historical discourses today. She has major works of exploration and navigation featured in the permanent exhibition displays of the National Maritime Museum Sydney, Parliament House ACT, and National Museum Australia. 2004 attained an artsACT - Project grant for a community research project culminating in a solo exhibition of works based on information gathered from the Gunai-Kurnai people of Gippsland, ‘Songlines-journeys through country’. Tiernan has built her reputation on richly research-based content, quoting from her own heritage, as well as European and Indigenous archival records

Tiernan’s most recent body of work focuses on the Whales of the Southern east coast of Australia, draws together all  threads, incorporating reference to Whale Songlines, navigational discovery and human environmental degradation.

Her highly tactile and surreal paintings capture the beauty, monumentality and power of the ocean’s apex creature, the humpback whale. She locates them in dark, blue-green uncertain maritime worlds, their peaceful seclusion, broken by the disruptive horizontal or circular relays of audio vibrations, alerting the viewer to the mysteries of current disturbances in the waters, in this case sonic sounds waves.