Helga Butzer Felleisen holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Classical Civilizations and in Classical Archaeology from The University of Chicago and from Indiana University, respectively. A Kress Foundation Fellowship in 1989 enabled her to conduct her doctoral research in Greece. Since 2000, Helga has done free-lance consulting for home and landscape design. She attended the Glassell School of Art, Houston and the Boston Architectural Center; she later earned a Diploma and Fifth Year Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Helga has won awards and shows her work extensively. Her work is in private collections in the United States and in Europe.

A child of immigrants with a strong ethnic identity, Helga considers herself a third culture kid (TCK). She has always lived between cultures. To her, identity represents a tension between wanting roots and the freedom of floating. It is not surprising that her work centers on the relationship between identity and memory. It challenges the viewer to consider how who we are dictates what we perceive.

My work addresses memory and our temporal sense of identity. It juxtaposes the familiar and the unknown, the conscious and the subconscious. It invokes meditation and contemplation.

The natural world informs my work. Its simplicity of line is about wandering and discovery. I follow and respond. Whether by process, material or imagery, water is a recurring leitmotif. It is our pulse; its ebb and flow bears ideas, thoughts and recollections. It is the continuum that binds past with future.

I explore memory as palimpsests through various media. Paper is, however, my medium of choice. Its properties best convey memory and transience. While it is ephemeral, paper has history and strength. It has sound. It has texture and transparency.

My works of hand-cut paper are metaphors for past and future time. Together with light and air, they create undulating and ghostly tapestries of information. The ensuing images underscore the fragile nature of what is lost and retrieved, and how we choose to reinvent it.