"Black Dog" Painting

Helena Guina is a Melbourne-based visual artist working across painting and mixed media. Her practice explores memory, psychological tension, and emotional fragmentation through a visual language that combines representational imagery with surreal and symbolic distortion. Interested in the unstable space between inner experience and external appearance, she creates works that evoke vulnerability, unease, and introspection. Influenced by expressionist sensibilities and personal narrative, Guina’s work often reflects on identity, feminine subjectivity, trauma, and the subconscious. Her paintings seek to hold contradiction: beauty and rupture, tenderness and discomfort, clarity and ambiguity. Through this tension, she constructs emotionally resonant image-spaces that invite layered interpretation. Guina has a background in design, visual arts, and commercial studio practice, and has also worked across mural projects and community-based creative settings. Her practice is grounded in both technical sensitivity and psychological depth, with an ongoing focus on creating work that is intimate, contemporary, and affec