Helena Sanders (b. 1983 Austin TX, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam, NL and Vienna, AT. Her practice takes form as abstract painting and drawing, installations, writing, audio and live performance.

Throughout her work, she explores the slippery semiotics and materiality of color (as organic and synthetic pigments, dyes, paints, etc) to narrate complex histories and presents of Place, notions of land stewardship, land access, and environmental exploitation. She is particularly interested in sites of resource extraction such as ochre and coal mines, where folklore, science, death, desire and economics overlap in the creation of color.

Helena is interested in how embodied engagement with these materials and their meanings might offer up possible escape routes from dominant Colonial or Capitalist thinking about the roles of artistic production and cultural (in)accessibility. If one language or another limit us and censors how we are able to narrate our stories and history through inherent bias, then can color provide a tool through which we can sing ourselves back into the world?

These interests tangle up with Helena’s own biography; growing up in North Carolina (US) near the Appalachian mountains, with a Dutch father of Indonesian roots, and Polish-German mother who’s family spent their first generation in America coal mining in the company town of Crabtree, Pennsylvania.

Helena earned a Bachelors of Science from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2005) with concentrations in painting and textiles, and an MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (2019)

Helena is involved in the production of artist-run events and workshops in and around the Netherlands, from textile dyeing workshops and lectures, to AV Club Amsterdam; an experimental video and music series which ran for six years at OCCII, Amsterdam. She also plays accordion & sings in the epic 7-piece performance and pop collective, Cold In Church.