Animals and landscapes remain central to Helmore’s visual language, each charged with emotional and perceptual depth. Rendering his animal subjects with quiet intensity, wolves, horses, and birds appear not as symbolic tropes, but as thinking, feeling presences.
Helmore’s interest lies in what he calls “the being inside the beast”, a space where instinct and interiority coexist. These paintings resist distance; instead, they ask that we meet them eye to eye, implicating the viewer in a perceptual relationship that is both affective and elemental. Their gaze or presence is direct, measured, and often disarming, creating a moment of relational tension between viewer and subject. In these encounters, the painting becomes less a representation than a site of exchange, where instinct, recognition, and empathy shape our perception.
His landscapes operate in a similarly suspended space. While some draw from specific geographies, particularly the coastal terrain of Hawke’s Bay, where he spent his childhood, Helmore transforms these references through scale, colour, and atmosphere shifts. Familiar landmarks, such as Cape Kidnappers and Te Motu-o-Kura, emerge like half-remembered places: seen through the lens of memory, softened by light, and fragmented through time. Other works depict imagined territories altogether; surreal plains and fractured horizons that resist spatial certainty, evoking not a particular place but a state of perceptual flux.
Helmore works fluidly across scale, from expansive large-format paintings that immerse the viewer to more intimately scaled works that invite close, contemplative engagement. Each composition holds a precise spatial rhythm, balancing stillness with tension, openness with psychological charge.
Helmore holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design from Massey University, Wellington (2005), and has worked as a full-time artist since 2015. He has exhibited widely across Australia and New Zealand, with finalist selections in the Park Lands Art Prize (2018, Adelaide) and the John Villiers Outback Art Prize (2020, QLD). His work is held in collections across Australasia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, and the United States.
Joe Helmore has been represented by Parnell Gallery since 2017.
