Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist, activist and academic. She has been based in London since 2003. Within her live art practice, Helena works with time, liveness and the materiality of the body; both within constructed installation environments and site-specific spaces. Drawing on her lived and embodied experience through her work Helena seeks to positively violate the systems, borders and rules that construct gender. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. From her diasporic vantage point as an Irish woman living in Britain, Helena has examined histories of colonialism and migration in relation to issues of gender and labour, alongside the radical activism of Irish feminist diaspora.

Helena graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art in 2001 and completed her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. In 2009 she received a Doctorate Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to undertake a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London, which she completed in 2013. Over the course of her doctoral research, entitled, ‘Live Art and Femininity in Post-Conflict Ireland: Between Negation and Reproduction, Rebellion and Conformity,’ Helena made a number of durational live art performances that explored Irish cultural histories. For example, in 2010 she performed Invisible Stains based on the labours, losses and political whitewashing experienced by the women detained in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries at Right Here, Right Now, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin. She devised a site-responsive durational performance entitled, Containing Crisis, at Strokestown Park House: The National Famine Museum of Ireland in 2011, which interrogated the haunting power of the Famine in relation to the Republic of Ireland’s recent economic collapse. In 2012, Helena co-curated and participated in LABOUR; a touring group durational exhibition that bought together eleven female live artists native to or resident within Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Exploring issues of gender and labour in the Irish region, taking into account the relevance of Ireland’s geographic proximity to the UK, LABOUR toured London, Derry/Londonderry and Dublin.

Helena has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. Her work has been featured at The Dublin Live Art Festival (2014 and 2015), The Athenuem Theatre, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon (2013), I’m With You at the Hayward Gallery (2012), Response at Landguard Fort, Felixstowe (2010, The National Review of Live Art (2002 and 2007), The Zaz Festival, Israel (2007), Art Radionica Lazereti, Croatia (2007), Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance at Goldsmiths University (2007), The Wormhole Salon at the Whitechapel Gallery (2007), Bodily Functions, The Granary Theatre, Cork (2005). In 2016, Helena performed a new site-responsive live art work that considers the activism of the women imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin following the 1916 Rising in relation to contemporary tensions between nationalism and feminism. This was featured in Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol as part of the Arts Council of Ireland's 2016 Centenary programme.

Helena is a founder member of the direct-action feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion). Since its formation in December 2013, this intergenerational collective has undertaken a number of public interventions, which challenged the severe restrictions on access to abortion in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Between 2013 and the successful referendum to repeal the 8th amendment in the Republic of Ireland on 25th May 2018 that enabled the government to legislate access to abortion, Helena Walsh played a key role in sustaining the collective collaborations of Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the development of the group’s public performances, publications and media campaigns.

Helena regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She has published in collections focussed on live art and also the performing arts in an Irish context, including peer reviewed journals such as Scene: Special Issue on Performance and Ireland (2020), Études Irlandaises: Special Issue Irish self-portraits the artist in curved mirrors (2018) and Contemporary Theatre Review: Special Issue on the Northern Irish Peace Process (2013) and Contemporary Theatre Review: Special Issue on Live Art in the UK (2012). Her chapter ‘Developing Dialogues: Live art and Femininity in Post-Conflict Ireland’ is featured in Performance Art in Ireland: A History (2015), the first book devoted to performance art in the north and south of Ireland. Her writing is also featured in collections focussed on reproductive rights campaigns on the island of Ireland, including Feminist Review: Special Issue on Abortion in Ireland (2020) and Decriminalising Abortion in Northern Ireland, a forthcoming two-volume collection. Alongside her artistic, activist and academic work, Helena is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.