Helen Sear : One Thing Next to Another

11th - 15th March, 2026

HAPAX welcomes Helen Sear to HAPAX Living Room, our West London space dedicated to showing new or experimental forms of lens-based art

Helen Sear will be in residence at HAPAX Living Room sequencing images for a book, making new connections between past and present work and looking at the spaces in between.

Visitors are invited to the Living Room to meet with Helen and become 'curator for the day'. Spread around the walls will be images from some of the artist's recent projects, which you will be invited to move, group and re-arrange; resulting edits will be photographed and compiled into a special archive of multiple authors and voices, a multiplicity of links, readings and associations - the threads of a future publication and an invaluable parts of an artist's creative practice.

Location: HAPAX Living Room, 17 Empress Place, London SW6 1TT

12th March 6-8pm – Opening conversation: The Edit
Please join us for an opening conversation with Helen in the midst of her installation in the Living Room.

13th – 15th March - Curator for the Day
Helen will be in residence 12-4pm for discussions about her recent practice. Attendees are invited to re-arrange, mix up and sequence images on the walls for photographic documentation of this important part of an artist’s practice. Please email editors@hapaxmagazine.com to book in for a visit to this evolving work in progress, and make your curation over tea and coffee.

16th March – HAPAX Idea Snack with Helen Sear
Join us for the next installation of our peer-to-peer artist meeting in the Living Room, with Helen Sear and HAPAX editors. Space is limited, booking coming soon via Eventbrite

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Helen Sear’s practice focuses on the co-existence of human, animal, and natural environments and is rooted in an interest in Magic Realism, Surrealism and Conceptual Art. She studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London, Slade School, her practice coming to prominence in the late 1980s, when she worked primarily with mixed-media installation, performance and video. Her photographic works became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured extensively in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Photography remains a central subject and medium in her work, which often challenges the dominance of the eye and the fixed-point perspective associated with the camera lens, and explores the potential of the artwork to activate and elicit feeling.

Sear was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 presenting a suite of new works…the rest is smoke. Her most ambitious video work to date, wahaha biota has been shown in the UK, Netherlands and Switzerland in 2018 /2019. Two major works were acquired by the Hyman Collection in 2020, and the UK Government Art Collection in 2022. Era of Solitude, work made in Durham North Carolina was published by Dewi Lewis in 2021. In 2022 Sear was awarded a feature commission in HAPAX Magazine no. 3, for her new project ‘New Dressings for Old Wounds’. In 2024, Sear's project 'Within Sight' at Fotografia Europea presented a suite of interrelated multiple and composite works that explore the dissolution of a single-lens perspective in photography.

Sear was elected a Royal Academician in 2024. She currently lives and works in France and the UK. helensear.com

HAPAX Magazine is co-directed by Christiane Monarchi and Gordon MacDonald. HAPAX Magazine takes its name from the literary term ‘hapax legomenon’ describing something unique, new and ‘said only once’. Twice a year, HAPAX commissions artists and curators to produce new photographic projects which are shared only in the pages of the publication and not on the internet. Proceeds from sales of magazines are reinvested into future publishing commissions, to support photographic projects and the creative professionals making them.

HAPAX Living Room is dedicated to showing new or experimental forms of lens-based art in the living room of our office, part of the creative spaces of Empress Studios, in Earls Court, London. For more information and details on upcoming exhibitions, how to visit us, propose a project or take part in an event, please look out for announcements on our site. hapaxmagazine.com

For more information, images or to arrange an interview or appointment with the artist, please contact: editors@hapaxmagazine.com.