Zak Helenske

Lives and works in Kutztown, PA, USA

Artist statement

This body of work describes a disconnection between our built and wild landscapes. It emerges from the labor I offer the land, restoring, re-wilding, and maintaining the forest that works to reclaim the fieldstones that my house is built from. I find clarity in the manic activity of an art practice and am grounded by the physical intellectualization of labor and the wild materials I work with. I cut and carve freely, releasing shapes and discovering form. The cutoffs are saved and compiled into a library of leaves and petals. The stems are harvested limbs from the forest, sometimes pruned, usually found suspended in the air, held by their survived family of branches. The finished piece is an assemblage, individual parts, pinned, joined, or hung together to create an oversized single stem flower. I objectify the landscape as a way to show reverence for our forever old relationship. The work references volunteerism in the plant world, uninvited, inevitable, sometimes a nuisance, and sometimes a gift. This is nature’s civil disobedience. In the competing human reality, I make these plant objects in a similar way, listening to intuition, acting on impulse, refusing expectation. Volume is history, shape is behavior, nature is object, and scale offers perspective. The flowers, mounted on the wall, monumental, look over the viewer and carry the weight of their ideals.

Artwork