Helen Bermingham’s works become both physical and psychological spaces - shifting terrains where memory, time, and material gesture meet. The artist’s process begins with fragments: digital collages composed from photographs of brushstrokes and painted marks drawn from previous paintings. These selected micro-compositions constitute the foundations for new paintings, creating a layered dialogue between past and present. As paint is applied, stratified, erased, and reapplied, these familiar forms are repeated and transformed, opening up new spaces of association. "By repeating brushstrokes I give them a different life, a potential new meaning," Bermingham reflects, drawing a parallel between the mutable nature of memory and the evolving language of Abstraction.

Bermingham’s surfaces hold this tension between fast and slow, control and release. Loose, fluid gestures sit alongside areas of intricate mark making; light, quick strokes balance against denser, laboured passages. The painting process itself becomes a conversation - between the considered structure of the initial collage, the intuitive, unanticipated marks that emerge through working, and the thoughts and memories that surface along the way.

For Bermingham, each work is not a fixed statement but an unfolding narrative - what she describes as a "fictionscape" - where the echoes of past gestures collide with new possibilities. Just as each repeated brushstroke subtly shifts in form and meaning, so do our memories transform each time we recall them. The artist draws from writers like Rebecca Solnit and physicist Carlo Rovelli to approach painting as a medium where time folds in on itself, where each new mark retains the trace of what came before, and anticipates what is yet to come. "Throughout my practice as a whole, in terms of repetition, there is this kind of treasure hunt of mark making. A single brushstroke or painting fragment can be traced back through my previous works, and its development and changes tracked. In this way, I see painting almost as a kind of ‘genealogy’ of mark making, a repository of time and memory."

Bermingham’s paintings blur the lines between recollection, iteration and invention, offering viewers an open, dynamic field where meaning is always in motion - glimpsed, remembered, and reimagined.