Helena Barnes (b1992) is a painter living in the North East of the Scottish Highlands.

She works primarily in oils and acrylics on panel and unprimed canvas, and is interested in how material behaviour — absorption, layering, removal, and viscosity — can evoke the shifting, unstable, and liminal qualities of landscape. The slowness of oil paint allows her to work with duration; surfaces are built up and eroded over time, mirroring the geological and atmospheric processes that form the terrain itself.

She is fascinated by the alchemy of paint — how emulsion retracts from oil, how acrylic clings on top, how a brush or scraper dipped in white spirit can shift a surface as dramatically as weather reshapes a landscape. This dialogue between material and place underpins her practice, reflecting the instability and richness of the land itself and revealing ‘ghosts’ beneath the painted surface.

During her time at the Fish Factory, she painted largely on the floor, scraping, pulling, pouring, glazing, revealing, layering, scratching, and combining materials in ways that do not always belong together (oil versus water). She forced these materials into a single work in an effort to capture liminal spaces and her surrounding environment.