Biodata
‘Helen Stacey finds inspiration in the landscape . . . (that) becomes a metaphor for human experience and spiritual and creative quest.’
Adam Dutkiewicz (art critic & art historian)
Since 1987 Helen Stacey has held over thirty solo exhibitions and participated in some fifty group shows in Australia and other countries. Living Desert (with textile works created with Lorraine Marter) toured to four states, then to Beijing in 1990. In 1997, with Elsie Reade of Reade Art, she coordinated Journey & Discovery with seven other SA artists touring to London, Kuala Lumpur, concluding at Hill-Smith Fine Art, Adelaide. In 2004, with Sheila Whittam, she conducted a week’s workshop for women asylum seekers at Baxter Detention Centre. Grants from Country Arts SA enabled artist-in-residencies, mentoring and a co-consultancy for the SA-Malaysian exhibition exchange, Antara – Between Remote Regions, partnering CASA with the National Gallery of Malaysia 2000-2001. She was joint coordinator of two Alexandrina Farm Gate Festivals, 2010-12, and a co-collaborator in The Border Crossing Art Project in 2010, a New Zealand, Thailand and SA initiative that toured to Bangkok and Adelaide.
In 2007 at the RSASA, her solo, Negotiating Boundaries, explored the gate as a metaphor for colonisation and spirituality in the Alexandrina Lakes region. A series of collaborative works with Ngarrindjeri artist and Elder, Ellen Trevorrow, lead to Ngarrindjeri weaving being part of the exhibition’s tour to four regional galleries. In 2014 she and Gaynor Hartvigsen presented Liminal at the South Coast Regional Gallery.
From 2013 to 2018 she and her husband, Dr David Bunton, (songwriter and performer) took a multi-media social-justice exhibition, Australian Reflections on ‘Blackbirding’, to Queensland, Fiji and Vanuatu. Then in May 2018 an expanded exhibition and forum was co-hosted with the Pacific Islands Council of SA and the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre at the UniSA, Adelaide, assisted by a Peace Foundation grant.
HORIZONS – art as a transforming journey was opened by Professor Simon Biggs, Director of the UniSA SA School of Art, at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts on Sunday March 24th 2019. Her book, HORIZONS – art as a transforming journey, was launched at the opening.