Helen Dowling is from the Waikato and graduated with an MFA from Whitecliffe in January 2017. 

She has been a finalist in the NZ Painting and Printmaking Award four times and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Waikato Museum and the Wallace Arts Trust Auckland as well as private collections.  She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions within New Zealand.

Helen’s interest lies in painting images that combine thoughts, observations and experiences of people and places. This combination of flexible and unstable variables allows for an exploration into what it is that unfixes yet somehow re-forms the 'real'.  "A successful work has to teach me something, not just technically but narratively.  It has to give up something it's been holding onto, to reveal some hidden, core quality of humanity. Most of all it needs to surprise and unsettle me because in that unsettling I get the feeling that a certain truth has been disturbed".

"My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like but truer than the literal truth." - Vincent Van Gogh