BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1998, multidisciplinary artist Helenya Apostolou lives and works around North Wales, choosing to return to the area she grew up around after graduating with a 1st Class BA Fine Art (International) degree from The University of Leeds in 2021.
Graduating with specialised knowledge of print-making, Helenya continues to practice serigraphy and teaches the skill through workshops in both online and physical settings. She also creates bright and vivid acrylic paintings, alongside the single tone, dot-work illustrations which she uses to screen-print.
Her work focuses on bridging the gap between movement and stillness, employing the Samoiloff Effect as a means of creating short, stop motion animations. When exposed to red, green and blue LED lighting, her work moves and changes, mimicking natural movements such as ripples in water, blinking eyes and flowers in bloom. Helenya illustrates images in threes, and screen-prints in layers using colour-separation printing to achieve three clear and separate image stills under RGB lights.
Helenya’s Greek-Cypriot heritage and familiarity with a different culture gave her the confidence to study abroad for a year in Marseille, at Ecole Superieure D’Art et De Design Marseille Mediterranee, from 2019 to 2020. Here, she was part of her first international group exhibition ‘Too Much, Un Peu’.
During the lockdown of 2020, Helenya held her first solo show, ‘Colour: Filtered Reality’ as a socially distanced event.
Since then, Helenya has been part of four other group exhibitions, most notably: ‘Fickle Spaces’ at the School of Fine Art History of Art and Cultural Studies, Leeds, in 2021, and ‘Queer Leeds’, at The Tetley, Leeds, in 2022. The continuation of her practice is rooted in creating and selling original designs as prints and commissioned pieces, while her new projects extend to painting.