Helen Marten: SOS
Helen Marten’s work is replete with metaphor, language, literature – material renders of complex ideas and systems. Hers is a practice with endless threads, a practice to watch.
Image credit: Installation view, Helen Marten, Sparrows On the Stone, 2021, Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photos: Eva Herzog. Courtesy Sadie Cole HQ, London © Helen Marten
The rise and rise of UK-based artist Helen Marten has been steady. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art in 2008, won the Boise Travel Scholarship in 2009, the Lafayette Prize in 2011, the LUMA Award in 2012 and two prizes in 2016 – the prestigious Turner Prize and the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. In an industry first, she insisted on sharing her winnings with all finalists for both awards. She was included in the Venice Biennales of 2013 and 2015, and the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016.
Her artwork, like her writing, is densely layered with tangential, mind-testing references and her use of media (sculpture, painting, installation) is wide-reaching and eclectic. Marten’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom since her highly successful solo show at Serpentine Gallery in 2016 is titled Sparrows On the Stone, opening in September 2021 at Sadie Coles HQ in London. In this new body of work, she casts her conceptual and aesthetic net far and wide. The exhibition includes 14 beautifully detailed drawings from diverse sources, a large sculptural stick figure that straddles the gallery and its walls, a series of silk-screened paintings with sculptural extensions, and others that become three-dimensional constructions of language. What unites this disparate group are their motifs, rhythms of language and emotional range, tied to an allegorical physical body that projects a series of systems, agency and ideas.
The title Sparrows On the Stone is not easily unpacked – an ordinary bird allied to a natural material that evokes the ancient literary tablet, perhaps – but its shorthand becomes SOS, an apt clarion call after the difficulty of a global pandemic that has attacked humanity ...Subscribe to read this article in full
