Unfolding across video, performance, photography, print, and text, Helen Cammock’s work explores the multitude of intertwined narratives, both personal and historical, that form the fabric of our culture. She is interested in how these stories are constructed and how their meaning alters depending on who is doing the telling, who is listening, and how the story is told.
In her recent body of work and film of the same title Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience, 2022, Helen directs her focus to the different ways we experience, understand, and communicate the twinned concepts of resistance and resilience. Partnering with a number of social care services, including Pause, a London-based organization supporting women to make changes in their lives, she centers the voices and embodied experiences of social care providers and receivers within this exploration.
Through regular collaborative workshops organized over three years, the groups experimented with drawing, music, and movement. They considered song and gesture as ways to communicate through the body and reflected on how the voice can shift registers to express pain, joy, rage, and care, whether alone or surrounded and supported by other voices. In a process that is documented throughout the film, the groups rehearse and eventually perform together, referencing the long history of singing as an act of collective self-care.
Bass Notes and SiteLines is part of Rituals of Speaking, a film-led series that explores how artists represent the voices of others through collective storytelling.
Images: Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience, stills (2022).
About the artist
Helen Cammock uses film, photography, print, text, song, and performance to examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages.
In 2017, she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2019 she was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. Helen has exhibited and performed worldwide including recent solo shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Photographer’s Gallery, and Serpentine Galleries (London, UK); Performing Arts Center STUK (Leuven, Belgium); Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia, Italy); VOID (Derry, Northern Ireland); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland); Kestner Gesellshaft (Hannover, Germany); and Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany).
