Sermon, Helen Mccusker, 2024, Oil on linen, 40 x 30cm, 15.7” x 11.8”
Roominations, Helen McCusker, Oil on canvas, 2025, 61 x 46cm, 18 x 24”
Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Strings of Light'
Helen McCusker
Gallery 1
14th May - 1st June 2025
PV Wednesday 14th May 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Helen McCusker (b.1991) lives and works in Glasgow. She recently graduated from The New York Academy of Art and Turps Banana, London. Her work has been exhibited in group shows in New York and London and is held in private collections across the USA, UK, and Japan.
In Strings of Light, Helen McCusker invites us into a world where memory and imagination intertwine. Her paintings trace the delicate threads that connect past and present, turning fleeting moments into vivid, dreamlike landscapes. Rooted in her upbringing in County Armagh, her work explores how memories evolve—how they shape us, slip away, and return transformed.
At the heart of her practice is a fascination with time’s quiet gravity: the way a single moment can carry the weight of a life. Childhood, nature, religion, and storytelling surface as recurring themes—metaphors for the complexity of being alive. McCusker’s recent works reflect on fragments from her early years: her mother brushing her hair before school, the vibrant, eccentric colours of their kitchen, and the magical way children reimagine the world.
Colour holds particular power in her compositions, especially vermilion red. It appears like a pulse, a force of memory and emotion—what Derek Jarman described as a colour that “protects itself” and “stakes a claim.” For McCusker, it becomes a visual echo of the ego’s persistence and the emotional intensity of remembering.
Her influences span the poetic and the painterly—Derek Jarman’s floral imagery, the magic realism of Summer 1993, and the quiet strength of artists like Sigmar Polke, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mary T. Smith. Irish oral storytelling traditions also run through her work, shaping how she layers memory, narrative, and feeling.
Though not created as a series, each painting in Strings of Light is connected—held together by a sensitivity to the inner world, where nature, memory, and imagination blur. In these works, the familiar becomes fantastical, the past becomes present, and time seems to glow softly, like light suspended on a string.
hello@blueshopcottage.com for all catalogue requests
Helen McCusker in her Glasgow Studio 2025