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Helen Eberhardie Dunn
M.F.A. Royal College of Art, M.R.S.S.
                                                                                 
                                                                                              aka Hella Song Beetle


Performance, Installation, Community, Offering, Eco-Feminism, Embodied Voice

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Artist Bio

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Helen Eberhardie Dunn is a contemporary artist with a multimedia practice spanning over three decades, integrating stone, bronze, clay, film, performance, and sound. Recent work includes EARTHflows (2023–2025), a community-centered ritual installation series exploring how micro-gestures ripple into macro ecological and cultural narratives.

 

Rooted in somatic awareness and collaboration, my projects engage multi-cultural communities in Southern Colorado, fostering creative environments through workshops that focus on shared stories, listening, and collective knowledge. My public commissions and performances highlight ecological fragility and the living intelligence of the soil web—such as Cracked Earth / Rising Blue (2023).

 

'As an educator, I cultivate reflective, playful, DEI-informed learning environments. My practice continues to explore how the Earth can act as co-author, collaborator, and transformative presence in art.'

TIME = ART

‘How do evolving timelines invite intersections with ecology, expansion, and contraction?’

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As an interdisciplinary artist, I explore conversations about spiritual ecology, creating immersive experiences through sculpture, performance, and installation that invite expansive awareness. I aim to create spaces for connection, reflection, and alternate perspectives. I am committed to contributing to a more just and compassionate world.

 

How can art catalyze change and inspire us to reimagine intersections between social and environmental justice and personal and collective change? My work is led by investigative approaches, incorporating locality, clays, found objects, pigments, fibers, plants, film, photography, sound, and light.

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‘Can we experience spatial relationships through vibration, harmony, and dissonance?’

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This work centers on curating collaborative ritual performances informed by solastalgia, our experience of climate change. EARTHflows is an ongoing project based on locality, reverence for the natural environment, and community collaboration. It includes EARTHflow Ritual Performances, Earth Experiments, and Ritual Action Flow Paintings.

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As the director of the ecological art collective SkySoul Studio, I host a platform that explores solastalgia. We are a developing collective of environmentally aware creatives collaborating on investigations into impermanence and ecofeminism. Public engagement in community events offers the potential for reframing ideologies of contraction. Art can unite people, challenge assumptions, and inspire us to envision new possibilities.

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Personal Reflection: What Is Home?

 

Born in the UK and raised traveling with a mother who loved camping, I have lived transiently in several countries. The difference between 'living somewhere' and feeling it as 'home' has always fascinated me. Is home inside us, or is it something we make? My mother’s pale‑blue Moonraker VW bus carried us from the Isle of Wight to Scotland, where we learned to settle into a sense of timelessness and oneness with the land. Walking in the rain, skinny-dipping in icy rivers, collecting sea-smoothed serpentine, basalt, and granite pebbles, and hauling larger rocks—these elemental immersions taught me that home can be felt in the vibrations of stones, oceans, waterfalls, and boggy moors.

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On the shortest day of the year, the longest night, I sit in Pueblo, Colorado, contemplating home amid grey green fields of cholla cactus that bloom once a year in majestic magenta cups against a cerulean sky. We moved here for the art studio—Sky Soul Studio—and the sky is vast. Pueblo City sits on ancestral Anasazi and Ute lands, built on clay, at the confluence of the Arkansas River and Fountain Creek. Pueblo's industrial past, its reputation for crime, and its underground histories remind me that home can be a layered, sometimes unsafe space, especially in the city. Creating Sky Soul Studio gave me a way to connect to Pueblo's culture and an amazing group of like-minded souls, a physical place to make art and explore materiality, a place to walk the rivers, befriend plants, lie on the earth, and celebrate spring wildflowers, shouting their songs to the sky.

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Recently, mud cracks have become a metaphor for home. Friends built an adobe floor of cracked earth, and I wondered what would happen if I poured a ton of local clay onto a gallery floor. Cracked Earth / Rising Blue emerged at the BloBack Gallery through communal preparation: wet mud cracked, water flooded the space, beeswax candles contributed the soft scent of sun and bees, and seeds sprouted in the mud, nourishing participants. The process invited these questions: 

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Is home the land, the Earth herself, family, or cultivated peace we find inside ourselves?

Is our current culture of fear rooted in the feeling that home is threatened?

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Reading Terry Tempest Williams' recent article in Emergence magazine, 'Hollow Bone', on the Great Salt Lake reinforces for me that home is both a landscape and an inner stillness, especially in hard times. Like solitary bees finding ecstasy in Spring flowers, I feel a sense of expansion in mud cracks—the liminal signs of transformation, death, and the potentiality of impermanence.

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Hella SongBeetle, Pueblo West, Dec 21 2025

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