The exhibition Words Fail Me is the latest in an ambitious series of drawings that Helena Tahir has built up over many years. It consists of a lush colour triptych and five small black and white drawings. The artist's pictorial expression is dominated by the figurative, which she has gradually developed from initial portraits to full-figure representations that she incorporates into refined compositions in the present exhibition. The large-scale, life-size sets of the central triptych are distinctly narrative, and the artist's sometimes romantic, sometimes chaotic fantasy world demands a slow and meticulous reading from the viewer. Thanks to her consistent and thorough questioning of the medium, each drawing presents her with a new technical challenge. She has found a convincingly fresh and authentic expression within a traditional medium; exploring volumes, proportions, contrasts and lighting effects by reflecting on the capacity of coloured pencil to contrast with other media such as painting and printmaking. The drawings are saturated with details that are either precisely sharpened or distorted beyond recognition. The latter is related to the artist's working process: she first intuitively forms individual figures and objects in a digital collage, where she stretches, mirrors and multiplies them at will. She is also instinctive in her choice of motifs, which she finds while leafing through old magazines or is attracted by their symbolism. At the same time, she chooses them by following the previously described aesthetic principles given that for the next stage, i.e. the transfer of the images from digital collage to drawing, the selected elements must be varied, attractive in colour and have a unique texture or a particular sheen as luminous objects require greater precision in the application of subtle transitions between tones. The incredibly precise drawings required total dedication and a tireless eye for detail – it took the artist 32 days with 14 intense hours per day to complete the central triptych.