Books by Helen Hughes

Described as one of Australia's most inventive artists, Mikala Dwyer creates objects and installations that are both playful and provocative, re-imagining familiar materials and what they say to us about the world in which we live. Mikala Dwyer: A Shape of Thought looks at Dwyer's work over the past three decades documenting the evolution of her practice and her influences. Her work is characterized by a playful and excessive accumulation of elements - she has created installations out of fabric, play dough, stockings, felt, vinyl, plastic, organza and nail varnish. Her choice of materials has been identified as feminine and by extension as a subtle feminist critique of recent art history. However her teasing references to modernist abstraction, the more organic forms of minimalism and to pop art (such as the saggy Kenneth Noland-like target forms and Oldenburg-esque baggy vinyl shapes in 'Hanging eyes') are an acknowledgment of antecedents rather than necessarily having a critical agenda. Dwyer's highly engaging sculptures explore ideas about shelter, childhood play, modernist design and the relationship between people and objects. Often beguiling in their colour and profusion, her works incorporate raw materials and found objects in inventive and unexpected ways that transform their architectural settings.

This is the first book-length study of environmental documentary filmmaking, offering an analysis of controversial and high-profile documentary films. With analyses that include the wider context of this filmmaking about local rural communities in Britain and Europe, this book also contributes to the ongoing debate on representing the crisis.

Explores the ways in which romance authors have sought to represent our fantasies of life in the past ever since the first "cloak and dagger" tales of the 1930's. It examines how, with the social upheaval of the war, these cut-and-thrust swashbucklers gave way to the female-oriented romances.