Every portrait begins by slowing down, spending time with my sitter and hearing their story - their family, their history, the things that have shaped them. What I learn finds its way into the painted surface through pattern, and ornament. I ask every sitter to bring an object that matters to them: a keepsake that will tell me something about their values. Whether or not it appears in the finished painting, its presence shapes the work.

Pattern is the language I work in. Drawing on traditions of embroidery, symbolism and decoration from across cultures and centuries, it lets me convey what a likeness on its own cannot: where a sitter started out, the journeys made along the way, the small private references that matter to them. I'm interested in how decoration travels - how a motif moves between countries and across generations, picking up meaning as it goes.

The surfaces of my paintings have a history of their own. I rework them, scrub back and allow earlier marks to surface, so the finished panel registers the time spent on it.

Alongside my commissioned portraits and the Drawn to the Boro project I am currently working on, a new series is emerging - paintings about girlhood and inherited pattern. The same interests are at work: pattern as language, pattern as inheritance, pattern as the background we absorb without noticing.

Helen Bainbridge is a British portrait artist based in Gloucestershire. She believes that part of what we are losing as a society is the simple practice of sitting down and truly listening to someone. Portraiture is a rare medium for that kind of attention. It asks both the painter and the viewer to slow down and look carefully. Her hope is that her paintings offer whoever stands before them: not a stranger to be observed, but a person to be greeted.

Pattern enters the painted surface as a form of narration. It's a way of expressing a sitter's history, and something of their inner life. 

She studied Fine Art in Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Newcastle, earning a BA and MA, and taught at Cleveland College of Art for ten years before working as a successful interior designer. She returned to painting full-time several years ago.

Helen is currently working on "Drawn to the Boro", a project of ten large-scale portraits of Middlesbrough residents nominated by their communities, each connected to a story of migration. The project is supported by Borderlands, the Creative People and Places programme for Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland, one of a number of national programmes funded by Arts Council England.

Alongside this work, a new series is emerging from the studio - paintings about girlhood and inherited pattern.

Her work has recently been exhibited with the Society of Women Artists, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Women in Art, Wells Contemporary, and ING Discerning Eye. She continues to attract private and public commissions in the UK and abroad.