This is a personal reflective response to two encounters with artist Helen Cammock before and during her Women In Print residency at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios (ACPS) in Preston. The first was an online meeting on Thursday 2 February with the aim of connecting and hearing about her ideas for the residency, and the potential directions these ideas might take.
Cammock is an award winning visual British artist, who received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2023. She won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and was a joint winner of The Turner Prize in 2019. The work that led to Cammock’s nomination for The Turner Prize was a solo exhibition, The Long Note, at Void Gallery, Derry. The Long Note is a film which explores the involvement and history of the different roles women had in the civil rights movement in 1968 Derry – the starting point of the decades-long Northern Ireland conflict known as the Troubles. Cammock centres and expands the complicated narratives of the women’s voices by presenting a combination of interviews, archive materials and newly created footage that invites the viewer to reflect on contemporary global civil rights struggles.
Born in Staffordshire in 1970 to a Jamaican father and a mother of Irish descent, Cammock’s work often reflects the experiences she has had growing up with multiple heritages and co-existing strands of identity in Britain. She is an artist challenging colonial narratives with her art while harnessing accumulated utterances of loss and grieving, archived from her global travels to disparate communities.
As an artist she understands that it is impossible for both her personal history and contemporary history in her lifetime not to influence the thought-provoking, vital work of juxtaposed words, imagery, and energy that she creates.
As a part of her artistic practice, which explores social histories and interrogates historical narratives in film, photography, print, text, song and performance, Cammock brings together sometimes conflicting voices to articulate both individual and collective experiences, considering what it means to exist as part of a community.
Cammock describes her residency with ACPS as a period of experimentation. A time of failure and development; a testing phase where she is investigating new means of expression with different source materials. The core of Cammock’s current project is storytelling in the form of a film project and installation investigating representations of love and care. The countries and the people she will encounter are the main characters – some stories are already partially known, others are, as yet, totally unknown – and this is how the project will remain fluid and changeable. The artist’s driving motivation is representing moments where care and love are present, removed or absented on an individual level, generationally, and structurally.
Cammock explains that she believes that ‘we are in a moment in time where we are witnessing love and care being eradicated moment by moment’, and her project seeks to reflect how that impacts individual psyches and what that does for parenting, growing up, developing – with particular focus on the interconnections between the structural and the personal and what they do to people, how they impact on individuals. She alluded to the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza as examples of lack of care for communities, but this project is on a more personal level.
In an attempt to retrace, and maybe reconstruct, the global ancestral journeys of both her parents, Cammock says that she anticipated the project taking her from Jamaica to Cuba, to Portugal, to Ireland, to Nigeria, to Togo and Benin to maybe film, write, draw, but always to have conversations with people in those places about what it is to understand in your community – whether localised or communities of interest – and to understand what it is like to be in places and spaces where you are not ‘othered’.
At this stage, all Cammock’s plans are conceptual, the artist sharing ideas in broad strokes before refining the output in the development and completion phases.
The strength of Cammock’s work resides in its ability to articulate and facilitate so much interpretation of the social and familial values of different communities trying to rebuild after their individual and devastating losses.
Cammock visited Jamaica a few weeks before our initial conversation, using the trip to think into the themes of love and care for her film project. This recent overseas research phase produced a series of line drawings that portray a sense of wonder. This image-making has prompted Cammock to consider creating something with stone lithography, and maybe combine that method with a combination of film, poetry, or music that are integral aspects of her practice.
The line drawings that Cammock produced for the project were drawn freehand following meditative drawing sessions while she was in Jamaica, where she yielded to either her emotions or a chosen sound like the sea, or specific pieces of music like The Köln Concert Part 1 by Keith Jarrett.
The drawings are a series of seemingly random shapes and lines that have been transformed into print using lithographic wax crayons on limestone. They have been created by following the meditative practice that opens the artist up to the vibrations and connections to people, places, and spaces. Cammock has translated these messages into lithographs that are carried and transferred by the limestone as an effective way of escaping the constraints of traditional sculptural methods of using stone.
Cammock’s interest in lithography surfaced from a conversation with research fellow Tracy Hill, joint curator of ACPS. Hill supports research and specialist printmaking practice, and ACPS collaborative partnerships with professional artists leads to exploration and development of technologies and innovative use of materials, combining non-traditional processes and new ideas in printmaking.
Hill mentioned to Cammock that there is a softness to the hand-created visual marks and lines when using lithography stones, and that this could create an interesting contrast to the sharpness of the text, and the depth of colour that Cammock uses in her screen prints.
ACPS research team’s skill and sensitivity to the form and surface of stone enabled Cammock the time and space to follow an organic, innovative process in creating fresh art that may prove to be significant and pivotal for her practice as she explores a new technique. Cammock has worked in close collaboration with ACPS since 2015 when they initially produced her prints for Carte de Visite, curated by a pivotal figure in the Black British arts movement, Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid. Since the 2015 project Cammock and ACPS have continued a dialogue of making and developing ideas.
As a continuation of her artistic practice which explores social histories and interrogates historical narratives while utilising film, photography, print, text, song and performance, Cammock brings together sometimes conflicting voices to articulate both individual and collective experiences as a way of considering what it means to exist as part of a community. Cammock explained that one of her central aims is for her work to exist as a dialogue and to amplify other voices, what she described as ‘the audible fingerprint’ – a recurring thread through her work and installations. In turn, her work becomes personal and intimate, as she commits to retelling the stories of others in her own voice. This concern with voice is a thread woven through her previous projects, including her 2020 film and text installation, They Call It Idlewild, wherein the artist reiterated that since she understood what words could achieve, both writing and language have been the foundations of all her work – be it in film, drawing, or print.
Through her current research period and travels Cammock has been inspired by the testimonies of activists, migrants and refugees in each location she has visited, describing this as witnessing a transformation of lament into an expression of survival and resilience.
These stories will emerge in a body of new works, the final form of which is yet to be decided. As such the Women In Print residency at ACPS is proving to be the perfect environment to enable Cammock to test her work with her desired medium of stone after her conversations with Hill.
At the end of our first conversation, Cammock reflects that she is, ‘expecting some voices that I actually don’t want to hear – maybe angry and violent voices, but maybe they’ll be important to hear because they will give some space and conversation to the voices I do want to hear’. She contemplates that when representing absent voices there will be discomfort, maybe pain in the telling, retelling or reframing of the stories relating to the themes of love and care. Cammock continues to muse that when considering and including missing narrative voices one has to understand that their utterances are changing the reality of the other voices from the past, especially as they are filtered and mediated through the work and practice of the artist.
The second conversation with Cammock takes place during the residency period. We discuss her project’s process in the Archive room of ACPS where one of her own prints from a previous project is mounted on the wall behind her. She describes the process of working in the studio print space, in collaboration with researchers Hill and Kathryn Poole, as somewhere to exercise patience, as the process of learning to work with lithographic stones is slow for her as an artist embarking on a new form of expression.
Stones typically convey connotations of durability or even permanence, but Cammock explains that the softness of the stones used in lithography comes from porosity, creating a give and take by sucking in what is offered to it, before the artist reverses the multistep process of rubbing gum, smoothing and wetting the stone. Cammock suggests that this process feels organic, while still producing chemical reactions of change that lead to new ways of thinking and making for her individual practice. This process speaks to Cammock of the dialogic process that humanity needs to undertake to change the world to be a better place for all. For Cammock, building this exchange-based relationship with the stone is why the process has to be so slow.
In the print studio, Hill and Poole’s preparatory process for the stone initially used traditional black ink, but through discussions Cammock decided she wanted to try something different, something non-traditional to get different results. As this is designated a ‘mistake and experimentation period’, they tried green, then brown inks on the stones, as the use of colour is integral to Cammock’s practice.
I feel a part of the excitement of discovery as Hill and Poole pull a print that Cammock made from the press – this was another step in the creation process, an unveiling and revelation of a new stone lithographic piece, like witnessing a birth, or revealing the expression of the previously unknown.
Moments earlier Cammock had shown me a laser etched woodblock print which she described as ‘delicious’. The creative joy was palpable between the three collaborators, and it enveloped me as well.
One of the final sentences that Cammock shared with me was, ‘Look at the stone, isn’t it beautiful?’
It truly was.
The limestone had been transformed through close communication with hands, water, inks, lithographic crayons.
The stone had been opened up and revealed new beginnings from old source material.
It is the use and known durability of stone that has allowed the record of historical fragments at the heartbeat of communities to endure throughout time like humanist totems in the landscape.
Cammock’s residency at ACPS is addressing the ancient themes of love and care within disparate communities using a combination of the new stone lithography skills, and well-utilised forms of media in her practice like film, photography, and print. Weaving her contemporary storytelling with techniques that highlight a common thread of humanity continually expressing a need to be seen, recognised and taken care of wherever people may be.
My conversations with Helen Cammock reminded me that we are all unique and special in our specific ways of being, yet we have more similarities and shared needs than differences. This emerging project is the first step in starting a new, much needed dialogue that can be a bridge to reconnecting lost voices and experiences to contemporary communities through the medium of art.
Making art is a process, some sections may be planned, others may seemingly materialise out of thin air, or a chance encounter, or an unexpected sound: all elements are stepping stones to the final creation of Cammock’s unique works containing a multitude of voices.
This exploration was informed by a series of conversations with Helen Cammock, the fifth in a series of written responses to the Women In Print artist residencies at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio, Preston.
Marjorie H. Morgan is an award-winning playwright, director, producer and journalist based in Liverpool. Her works explore the themes of ‘Home’ and ‘Identity’, in particular historic and contemporary migration stories, giving voice to those marginalised in pockets of British society. Marjorie also writes articles and essays, and teaches creative writing.
This exploration is supported by UCLan.
Published 01.08.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
2,214 words