Helen Cammock: There is bravery in sound
Helen Cammock: There is bravery in sound
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Helen Cammock

There is bravery in sound, 2023

Single colour screen print on Somerset Radiant white Tub Sized 410gsm
Diptych: single print each 11.7 x 16.5 inches
Hand signed and numbered by the artist
Edition of 30 + 4 APs

£ 550 (incl. VAT)

This edition has been produced in conjunction with Helen Cammock’s Radio Ballads commission, titled Bass Notes and SiteLines (2022). Radio Ballads takes its name from a revolutionary series of eight radio plays broadcast on the BBC between 1957-64. Focusing on workers’ experiences and struggles through a combination of song, music, sound effects and the voices of communities, each ballad presented lived experiences and stories of work and resistance in the UK, at a time of rapid growth and change. Building on this rich history, four new ballads were produced in the aftermath of twelve years of austerity and dismantling of the UK care sector. The projects were developed and sustained throughout multiple global crises, amid the compounding issues of systemic racism, ableism and the COVID-19 pandemic, which have shed light on the innumerable ways in which those who do the work of care are often unsupported and devalued.

As a former social worker, Cammock is conscious of the deep responsibilities that these workers hold for others, and the impact that this can have in people’s lives. Through sessions with both people receiving care and those who offer it through adult social care work and an organisation called Pause, Cammock explored these ideas and others using drawing, photography, film, and song. In their collaborative workshops, the groups sang together, considered gesture as a way to communicate through the body, and explored their connections through music and lyric writing – reflecting on how the voice can shift registers to express pain, joy, rage, and care, whether alone or surrounded and supported by other voices.

Cammock is interested in what resistance and resilience look and feel like, and the relationship between them. For Bass Notes and SiteLines, she asked how we use our bodies and voices to articulate what we feel, and how aware we are of these performances – both in a specific moment and throughout our lives. Cammock’s limited edition diptych presents the viewer with a line taken from her film, offering the proposition that “bravery” does indeed lie in the vibrating of our forms, our attempts to articulate the often incommunicable of our interior through the bodily production of, not just words, but pure “sound”.

“I’m interested in how resistance and resilience can be shared by people but be presented in different ways, and how they can be read differently because of a person’s experience, context and subject position.” – Helen Cammock

© Photo: readsreads.info

Helen Cammock

See more products by   Helen Cammock

Helen Cammock (b. 1970, Staffordshire, UK) works across moving image, photography, writing, poetry, spoken word, song, performance, printmaking and installation.

Cammock is interested in histories, authorship, storytelling and the excavation of lost, unheard and buried voices, often mapping her own writing, literature, poetry, philosophical and other found texts onto social and political situations. Her work has drawn on material from Nina Simone, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, The Housemartins, Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon and others to reveal the way in which we construct our own personal collage of influences and reference points to establish our own sense of self, context and history.

Cammock’s work has been screened as part of the Serpentine Cinema Series and Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme. She has exhibited at venues including Cubitt, London; Galerie Futura Alpha Nova, Berlin; The Tetley, Leeds; Open Source Contemporary Arts Festival; Hollybush Gardens, London; and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London. She has written for Photoworks and Aperture magazine and was shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize in 2015. Her work has been published in The Photographers’ Gallery journal Loose Associations and in an artist book and vinyl 12” Moveable Bridge with Bookworks, London. She has just finished a commission The Long Note with Void, Londonderry, which is soon to open as a solo presentation at IMMA, Dublin. She is making work for Novel as part of Reading International in 2018/19 and is beginning a new commission with Film and Video Umbrella/Touchstones/The Photographers Gallery. She will be artist-in-residence at Wysing in autumn 2019. Helen was awarded the 7th edition of the Max Mara Prize for Women 2018 and will have an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London in June this year and Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia in Oct.

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