Helena Aguilar Mayans is a Fine Art photographer who lives and works in Olot (Catalonia). She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a Master's degree in Art education. Her work explores the concept of beauty in decay and women’s own spaces. The relationship between ruins, Nature and humanity. She is inspired by female characters from bygone eras and her photographs are a gateway to other realities. Some artistic and literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are also a great source of inspiration to develop her work.
For years, she has been traveling around Europe looking for abandoned places that serve as stages to create her images. Visiting these vestiges she wonders what these spaces inhabited by women would have been like; in an exercise of revisiting history, in a subject where references are lacking and shunning total recreation. It is also a look at the past from the experience of the present. Inspired by the idea of “a room of one's own” forged by Virgina Woolf, she seeks to explain these spaces of one’s own, which end up becoming mental spaces and shelters for contemplation. At the same time, her work is also a way of registering a heritage that is slowly disappearing and a medium to bring these places back to life. Inspired by the art and ideas of the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Aesthetes, and often by forgotten female characters, who were part of these moviments.
Not only does she look for these derelict places, sometimes she also creates her own scenes from home. She captures her images on film photography and makes the artistic direction of most of her projects. Her work has been exhibited and published in various national and international media.