Born in 1977 in Île de France, lives and works in Montpellier.
Hélène Jayet is a French visual artist and photographer from Mali. She began her artistic education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, then trained in graphic design, photography and photojournalism in Paris. She has been producing portraits and reports for the press for the past ten years. In addition to her artistic work, Hélène Jayet teaches photography and visual arts at school and university workshops and recently at the art and images department of the Kourtrajmé school.
The artist's photographs have been exhibited at the La Gacilly festival, the Zinsou Foundation in Benin, the Rencontres photographiques de Guyane, the Bamako and Dakar biennials, as well as the Macaal in Marrakech, the BOZAR museum in Brussels and the Afrikan Museum in the Netherlands.
In parallel with his photographic research, the artist has reconnected with drawing and developed a new style.
In 2022, the artist participated in a residency on the island of Gorée, supported by the French Institute in Senegal, which ended with a solo exhibition presenting a new body of work in acrylic around the botanical history of the island and the ecological issue in Senegal.
She also presented her drawings at the Kinshasa Biennial in 2022.
In 2023, she is invited to participate in the IFITRY residency in Essaouira, Morocco.

Starting from old images of Africa gleaned from historical works or photographic collections, Hélène Jayet reinterprets them in the form of meshes of acrylic dots linked together by dry pastel, to the point of blurring the original image, and forcing us to step back.
An abstract mass of dots, similar to a canvas, when you are close to them, Hélène's drawings are revealed as soon as you take a few steps back, revealing characters and scenes from the daily life of colonial Africa. These drawings force us to evolve around them to change our perception and, in doing so, encourage us to reconsider our apprehension of Africa, its history and its heritage, by giving a new lease of life to characters who are usually photographed without their consent.