Helen SpencerPower Signals

Power Signals is a painting exhibition by Helen Spencer that looks closely at how old ideas about power are resurfacing in contemporary life. The works draw on mid-century media imagery, particularly photographs that once presented Western male authority, control, and dominance as normal or even admirable. Spencer revisits these images to question what they taught us then, and how their values are re-entering culture now.

The exhibition responds to a moment when views once assumed to be outdated are again being voiced with confidence. Ideas tied to patriarchy, nationalism, and cultural hierarchy are reappearing under the cover of tradition and nostalgia. Rather than treating these ideas as harmless or historical, the paintings ask viewers to notice how easily they slide back into everyday thinking, policy, and public debate.

Spencer works in oil on repurposed cardboard, a material that carries its own history of use and vulnerability, reflecting the precarious state of the world. Like power, cardboard is a construct. The materiality of the work moves towards sculpture, alluding to the internal structures that underpin power. In Power Signals, images are cropped, disrupted, or unsettled. What may first appear familiar and perhaps nostalgic can begin to feel uneasy.

Power Signals examines whose power is being normalised again, who benefits from its return, and what is violently lost when old structures regain their footing. The exhibition considers the values shaping our present, and the social, cultural, environmental, and personal cost.

Image: Helen Spencer (detail)