Dr Helen Idle
Hello, here’s a little bit about me.
I research and write for creative, cultural and public organisations that work with visual cultures, visual languages and knowledges to challenge inequity.
I completed a PhD at King’s College London which uses ego-histoire, ficto-critical writing, and life-writing to interrogate the space between this person and artworks by Australian Indigenous artists exhibited in Europe. In this liminal space there lies potential for decolonising ways of thinking and seeing. My thesis is accessible and personal, and was completed in 2017 through the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London, and awarded by University of London.
My academic CV is here at the King’s College London Research portal.
Additional to my academic work I write short and long form content for social media, websites, and marketing collateral. I am an experienced freelance communications project manager.
My areas of interest are: contemporary visual art, Australian First Nations visual art, strategies for decolonisation, artists’ moving image, life-writing, museums, knowledge-making. In this I challenge fixed ideas about how we humans be in the world, with this one planet.
I join others who believe each of us is entitled to basic human rights and freedoms. These rights are challenged by the changing political and social environment, highlighted by brexit and the 2016 US election. Toni Morrison tells us ‘we are made for these times’ and thus faced with new challenges we speak up on what matters.
Community, kindness and love connect us in the face of those narratives which are working to deny our shared humanity. What matters then is to be present and pay attention; to keep working together; to make positive changes. To take heart.
It matters: what we write, speak, and make matters.
Recent projects
Project Curator for Entwined: knowledge & power in the age of Captain Cook. The Portico Library 23 August to 13 October 2018.
My response to Sidney Nolan work held in University of Western Australian Collection was included in Nolan100.
Follow this link to my Catalogue essay for artist-curator Jo Darbyshire’s exhibition The Floating World. And this one to find my stories that form part of artist Barbara Campbell’s durational performance 1001 nights cast
Find me here email: helen @ helen-idle.com
Idle Marginalia is a blog space where I collect links for research and ongoing projects.