Helen Cammock

Helen Cammock is a British artist. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize and was awarded the prize along with the other three nominees. For the first time ever, they asked the jury to award the prize to all four artists and their request was granted. She works in a variety of media including moving image, photography, poetry, spoken word, song, printmaking and installation.

Life and work

Cammock was born in 1970 in Staffordshire, England. She grew up in London and Somerset. Her Jamaican father was a ceramicist and art teacher. Cammock's film Character Building deals with the acts of racism that she, her sister, and mother faced for being a mixed-race family.
Cammock worked for 10 years as a social worker. At the age of 35, she began her studies in Photography at the Royal College of Arts, followed by study at the University of Brighton.
Following the award of the Max Mara Art Prize in 2018, Cammock travelled across Italy to Florence, Rome, Palermo, Bologna, Venice and Reggio Emilia. She filmed a performance on Beatrice Cenci's spinet in Bologna. During this time in Italy, Cammock made her work Che si può fare, which is an exploration into women's lament, an important theme in much of her work.
Cammock's work often seeks to connect women's stories and voices across time, with common themes of oppression, feminist resistance, and solidarity, and exploring intersections of gender and race, the collective and the individual.

Exhibitions

2020: They Call It Idlewild at Wysing Arts Centre

The exhibition consisted of video and installed billboards across the Wysing Arts Centre site, with dialogue and text including questions "Can you remember when you last did nothing? When you last did nothing, can you remember how it felt?". Although made before the 2020 pandemic took hold, Erica Scourti noted in her review that "Cammock's static camera, placed originally to linger on interior details of Wysing's studio spaces, accommodation and grounds, all places of artistic activity now dormant, seems to anticipate our arrested motion".

2019: Che si può fare, which premiered at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in summer 2019 and was shown at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy in 2019–2020.

At the Whitechapel, "The main work is a three-channel film featuring interviews with activists, musicians, historians and artists from Cammock's time in Italy." The lives and work of women Baroque composers, Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana are also explored. A reviewer for the London Evening Standard noted that "its abiding message is of inspiring resistance to oppressive forces".

2019: The Long Note – Irish [Museum of Modern Art], Dublin, Ireland
2018: The Long Note – Void, Derry, Northern Ireland

The Long Note was nominated for the Turner Prize, and shown at Turner Contemporary in Margate, Kent, UK. The film and installation examines the civil rights movement in Derry, with a particular focus on the role of women, and makes connections between Irish civil rights and Black civil rights. In several sequences, Cammock combines found footage of Nina Simone with footage from the Troubles.

2017: Shouting in Whispers –

Awards

2018 – Max Mara Art Prize for Women
2019 - Turner Prize