Etty Yaniv interviews artist Helen O’Leary on the occasion of her show Home is a foreign country at Leslie Heller, New York, on view through May 20, 2018.

O’Leary comments: “Painting for me has always been like digging out of prison with a spoon. Each cumulative small gesture is adding up to an act of resistance and expression. For me the convoluted making and re-making, editing and revising, are processes that take out the extra, that brings things down to the nub of it all.”