Interview with Helen Bur: Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025

GraffitiStreet

Your work beautifully delves into the intricacies of identity and the human experience. I understand you've recently transitioned to painting inspired by personal experiences. Could you share more about this shift in your creative process?

Helen Bur

I think it was probably around 2018/19 that I solely returned to taking, creating and using my own images as the reference for painting. Before then there was a period where found imagery formed the majority of my references. It’s funny because during art college, I was obsessive with a camera, creating endless photo diaries of my life and painting from these images. And then during university I moved away from it.

I think the timeline fits with a sort of maturity or evolution of how I was digesting the world; firstly from those closest to me in those adolescent, identity forming years; then a departure away from that, a sort of empirical observation of the bigger picture, politics and experiences outside my own; and then a ‘full circle’ back to my own lived experience but encoded perhaps with a more subtle hope of the particular becoming universal.

Maybe too, the confidence of age telling me my own experience is valid enough to use and a realisation that some stories are not mine to tell.

There’s a quote by David Hockney that sums it up quite nicely; “I don’t go out and see as much as I used to. I don’t quite feel the need for it. I have to work things out for myself as it were. When you’re very young , you wish to be in the middle of a lot of activity because it’s stimulating to you. You are adding to it and taking out of it but there’s a point in life where you don’t need that crowd to do it. You have enough in your head to sort out.”

Helen Bur – Rotor VI (2024)

GraffitiStreet

You choose to use a brush for your large murals, setting you apart from the typical spray paint approach found in street art. How do you navigate the challenges of painting such expansive works? Also, would you walk us through your process for planning and executing a mural from start to finish?

Helen Bur

I used to use a bit of both but ultimately, I’d always used brush on canvas so that was the natural progression. I get a lot of joy from mixing my own colours and the messy carnage of a cherry picker covered in buckets of paint and a make-shift pallette.

The navigation of scale is a funny one; it takes me roughly the same amount of time to create a canvas as it does a wall, there’s just an upscaling of materials. It takes a little longer to alter things on a mural so ultimately there’s less build up of layers, less free gesture or accidental marks.

The planning stage varies depending on the project. Often the ‘sketch’ is just a photographic reference made to fit the shape of the wall, sometimes I’ll work from a painting already made on canvas, which is easier as a lot of the figuring out has already happened!

GraffitiStreet

The circular motif appears frequently in your work. What personal significance does this shape hold for you / represent?

Helen Bur

The attraction of the circle for me was its absolute non-committal to one meaning, which had always been a hard wire through my work.

It’s wholeness, unity, totality, eternity, but also repetition, constriction, stagnation. It has this polarity that means it can change an image’s narrative significantly depending on how the figure is interacting with it.

It’s also appealing in its utter universality and abundance as a symbol across cultures and histories.

GraffitiStreet

Your smaller installations often feature local figures seen from behind, suggesting movement or departure. What inspired you to adopt this unique perspective, and what emotions or thoughts do you hope to evoke in your viewers?

Helen Bur

Again, this is a sort of nod to the trope of the Rückenfigur, an aesthetic with a long history through the arts. And again, it’s this play between the personal and the universal; as lovely as it is to connect and depict a local individual, without a face, it also leaves space for a more universal resonance.

Making a portrait of someone by painting their face can sometime feel like a stark and invasive act, having to depict character through the subtleties of gait is gentler and allows some anonymity which feels like a rare luxury nowadays.

GraffitiStreet

How is your recent move to Cornwall and the renovation of your space influencing your artistic practice? Also, how do you balance studio work with street art?

Helen Bur

It’s been a whirl-wind few years in all honesty! I moved to Cornwall from London at the end of 2021, built a studio, found out I was pregnant, did a solo show in Madrid and welcomed my daughter in 2022, travelled for a lot of 2023 for murals and made another solo show in Denmark for 2024 then took a 10 month hiatus from painting to build a house from scratch with my partner and I am just about to get back into the studio!

The pull of motherhood and housebuilding have redefined my practice hugely and I still feel like I’m navigating the balance. There’s a lot more structure in my life now that’s meant I have to compartmentalise each aspect to be more organised and focused. But living away from the city and putting down roots on a farm has given me a slower more contemplative existence with a deeper connection to the land which allows more space for internal explorations. I’m hoping the next year or so is going to be a creative unpacking of this circumstance.

GraffitiStreet

I'm particularly intrigued by your "Everyday Painting" project. Can you tell us more about it and what inspired this initiative? Are you still able to paint every day despite your renovation and other commitments?

Helen Bur

The daily paints was first a series created between 2017-18 where I worked on these funny little 7cm x 7cm canvases, producing one every day for the best part of the year. It was a way to try and process and engage with the ever-expanding, ever-scrolling bombardment of imagery in the media and also a tool to think less / paint more, experiment with technique and get less precious.

They became a sort of sketch book diary / meditation. I got back to it again last year for a period and still have a stack of small panels waiting for me. I think it will be something I return to when-ever it’s needed, like a good stretch.

GraffitiStreet

Your canvas painting style includes traditional techniques like oil and watercolour. What initially drew you to these mediums, and how do they enrich your storytelling?

Helen Bur

I love the fact that when you use oil paint you are connecting to this beautiful vast and rich history of art. It’s so heavily coded, intoxicating and enduring as a medium. I’ve tried acrylic but it just doesn’t feel right to paint with plastic.

I’d like to experiment with making my own egg tempera with chickens from the farm, as this also taps into a rich history of art as well as connecting it directly to the place that it’s made.

Maybe I’m an old soul, but I just feel more enlivened by these enduring traditional mediums.

GraffitiStreet

How do you view the relationship between art and activism, particularly in the context of your own paintings?

Helen Bur

I think at its core, visual language is the most universal thing we have, so if activism’s roll is to unite people, then arts power to do this is huge.

I go through battles with myself on sometimes feeling the work I do is frivolous and in the past often made the choice to be present at the protest rather than the studio. It can be so difficult knowing how and where to show up in the face of so much widespread injustice, but in the end, you have to be strong enough standing on your own to lift anyone else up. So in those moments of strength, you have to use it.

I don’t necessarily see the work I make now as directly in the bounds of activism, but rather a quiet poetic narrative on the struggles and joys we all endure and digest daily.

GraffitiStreet

In your studio work for the GraffitiStreet X: A DECADE exhibition, you integrate the suffragette symbol—the sash—into your pieces. This symbol serves as a powerful visual echo of the continuing battle for equality. How do you believe it resonates today, especially amidst the ongoing struggle for gender equality?

Helen Bur

I think these paintings themselves were a sort of questioning of how relevant the sash is as a symbol for gender equality today. The suffragette movement itself was riddled with colonialism and racism, so when we celebrate their wins for feminism, we also have to recognise their downfalls.

The move towards intersectional feminism is so vital in understanding nuanced forms of discrimination but I think there’s still recognition due to the sacrifices of those early women’s movements. So I guess with these Sash paintings I wanted to explore that discomfort.

Helen Bur – Sash II (2022)

Helen Bur – Sash I (2022)

You can find the ‘Sash I and Sash II’ artworks by Helen Bur, which honour the suffragette movement, either in our new GraffitiStreet gallery or online here.

GraffitiStreet

With projections for gender equality extending to 2158, how do you believe artists can catalyse this change and raise awareness around women's issues? What impact do you hope your artwork, particularly those depicting themes like breastfeeding, will have on viewers' perceptions of women's rights and equality?

Helen Bur

Social change is a historically and painfully slow process isn’t it. I think the catalysts can only happen through sheer endurance, taking up as much space as possible and sharing our experiences, our oppression is structural and the necessary remedy is collective.

‘Radical feminist expression is a making visible of what we have been told to cover up, to correct, to make smaller’ I’ve borrowed this phrasing from an brilliant book I’m reading at the moment called Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin which looks at women’s complex history of creation, how the idea of ‘women as artist’ has often been considered monstrous, a selfish act that pulls us away from our ‘roles’. Historically we’ve had to be loud and angry to even get a foot in the door of the institutes of art, to redefine our own bodies from objects of art to makers of art. Our work as female artists now is still inevitably more politically charged; whether they want it to be or not, for women, the personal is political. But I think there’s now an interesting space we can occupy where we are being given more platforms to fill.

With images that explore themes like breast-feeding I wanted to believe we should not be afraid to fill these platforms with the soft and tender aspects of femininity if we want to. Of course, as exemplified by your projection for gender equality, there’s still a lot of work to be done. In raising awareness of the realities of issues like breast-feeding alongside the vast expanse of free or undervalued labour that is still often predominantly a woman’s work.

Helen Bur, Nuart Festival, Aberdeen

GraffitiStreet

As we aim to accelerate action for gender equity this International Women's Day, what message do you wish to communicate through your art, not just today, but year-round?

Helen Bur

In someways, the medium is equal to the message, if young girls and women can see other women working on cherry pickers, painting murals in the street that talk about issues that may affect their lives, then they are more and more likely to feel they can occupy that space too.

To be reflected is to be empowered.

GraffitiStreet

Looking forward to 2025, are there any specific mural projects on the horizon that we can be excited about?

Helen Bur

I always jinx it the minute I start talking about projects in the pipe line, the nature of the work is extremely precarious! But I am hoping to work with the Walls of Vision Project in Germany this year to re-envision a painting by Georg Friedrich Kersting, hopefully involving and elevating some local women and it’s also on a castle!

But I’ll keep the rest quiet for now ;)