HELEN MARSHALL RETURN TO BEGINNING
Return to Beginning, the title of a 1965 collage by Helen Marshall (1908–1996), encapsulates both her guiding philosophy and her life story: a life of cyclical returns, fresh starts and perpetual motion, moving ceaselessly for three decades across and between Europe, India and Australia.
Some journeys were made to reconnect with her family in Bellarena, Northern Ireland, or for practical purposes: to work with curators on significant survey exhibitions of hers and husband Phillip Martin’s work. Others responded to the attractions of warmer climes and inexpensive living in Italy and southern France, while yet others were made in search of enlightenment and an alternative vision of harmonious human coexistence. Throughout these various journeys, she sought a childlike innocence or, as Martin put it in a poem written for Marshall, ‘to restore wonder’.
Born Helen Marshall Allen, in Drumavally, Magilligan, in the Bellarena
