Artist spotlight: Helena Tomlin
This blog post focuses on the work of Helena Tomlin one of the artists commissioned for the Culture Box Show. She speaks to Chloe (the project’s Postdoctoral Researcher) about her creative process alongside her commission, Fold.
My chat with Helena was the best type of encounter: a meeting of minds. She was enthusiastic about the spontaneous possibilities of life, at the beginning stating that she adores the kind “of encounters that you don’t plan”, setting the tone for our conversation.
During the interview, she eloquently described her artistic practice and inspiration for her commission with Culture Box entitled Fold. We also chatted more broadly about the role of arts and creativity in wellbeing for people with dementia – drawing on her experiences of running workshops with residents of a care home in Bury. Helena was delighted that the academic conversation on arts-based approaches to health are burgeoning.
Helena describes herself as an artist whose work centres around memory, survival, and celebration. Of interest to her are questions surrounding women’s memory and experiences of the world, and how to celebrate them and work with them. Her work centres around a mix of mediums and materials, often she chooses material objects from her own family collection to work with – in particular, those objects that speak to her in that moment of time. Her artistic practice is eclectic, featuring a mix of media including video, installation, text, paint, and collage to name a few.
She commented that some describe her work as ‘socially engaged practice’ but she doesn’t necessarily like labels or pigeonholing herself into one artistic category. Instead, she wants to do things differently outside of conventional and formal artistic spaces which she thinks of as a ‘straight jacket’. For her, the work she does has a particular thread involving tracing the experiences and histories of the women in her family, using a mixture of materials, objects, and experiences to convey this.
She reflected on an ongoing project, Oma Dreaming, that involves tracing the maternal threads of her family through landscape painting.
“When you think about life beginning, you think about the natural and mountains were really central to this for me – the waxing and the waning of things. I mean this is things that artists have been doing for centuries, but it comes out in a particular way with me.”
Other elements of her work trace these maternal threads, one project, Her Tree, touches on these ideas through embroidery and textile work involving three generations of work. Here, folds are represented through the silent folding of the cloth in the video.
Fundamentally, her work is deeply personal and biographic, and she tells me that her upbringing had a lot to do with it:
“Memory and trauma interest me, particularly due to my childhood – I grew up with a German grandmother, who converted to Judaism, and a Jewish grandfather. I was brought up by them early on and met lots of refugees who came for tea. I witnessed a lot of things that I didn’t understand, but now I’ve worked through it, and I’ve realised that those memories stick with you, the trauma and all that. A lot of this experience was within the domestic setting.”
Helena has previous experience working with women with dementia in Bury care home where the project Wednesday Notes produced an installation of painted rice paper scrolls and a series of monoprints printed by the women at the care home. Her fascination with the relationship with memory and dementia was developed through that project:
“I’m really interested in other people’s memories, other people’s histories, the way that idea can play out endlessly – particularly around dementia. My sister-in-law died of early onset dementia. I am really interested in how people’s inner being – you lose some things somethings like around planning – but you don’t lose, this is from my experience working with people with dementia, you don’t lose the soul of the person. Often things will come out when you’re doing something creative and in the right environment, and that interests me as an artist.”
We then turned to her commission for the Culture Box Show, Fold. Fold will take the form of a series of rice paper artworks mounted on fabric and made using paint and printed collaged elements. They will be made so that they will be easy to display in the care homes. As part of the process of making this piece she will experiment with different types of folding, working with the materials to find the best way to reflect the concept of the Deleuzian fold. Helena uses this as a way to speak about the multiple layers of memory and experience, and how these (re)surface in people with dementia. Furthermore, drawing on the work of Deleuze allows her to think through the relations and assemblages that objects and people are enmeshed in together, the histories of objects and their evocative relations. As part of this, she’s interested in developing a ‘performance’ element in the viewing the work (the possible folding and unfolding of the pieces) as this is part of her response to respecting the complexities of memory. She will make the installation in my studio with careful instructions on how to assemble and display in the care home. Part of this performance is the fluid and impermeant nature of the work – it is not fixed or static in space:
“One minute they’re installations that happen, and then they go – so there is a record, but they’re not objects that can be… They won’t be objects that are kept. That’s because of my interest in feminist work. It circumvented the art world by saying that it’s a performance. So, here I am and then I’m not here anymore…”
This ‘interwoven’ artwork will contain both the repeated motifs from 30 years of her practice with the significant repeat motifs collected from care home residents. Her aim will be to show how process of memory work in art practice has a synergy with the creative responses made by care home residents with dementia when expressing deep seated memories in 2D form. For the art sessions in the care home, residents and staff will make images using simple drawings and paintings that relate to the conversations made after the initial sharing of one or two objects that are of personal significance.
She conveyed a sense of excitement about the unknowability of the multiple folds of interpretation involved in her commission:
“I’m feeling quite excited about this commission, because it’s not been done in this way before, so what’s happening is there is a set of simple instructions which each dyad will interpret in their own way. So, it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens with that, and how that impacts on how I interpret what they’ve interpreted. But I don’t know until I get there!”
She described it as an unusual commission as most of the time commissioners want to know what the intended output of the work will be. Furthermore, the format of the Show brings in a further dimension as her installation will likely to be only seen virtually. She reflected that the virtual medium would bring a different life to the work. This is combined with how the care workers are going to read and interpret the instructions that she has sent with the materials. She mentioned that these different interpretations could have an exciting and interesting effect on the installation of the work.
Interestingly, she reflected on the emotional toll of doing this kind of socially engaged work. From her experiences in Bury, she touched on moments where the project had brought up difficult memories for the women involved. This extends to the Culture Box commission where the virtual format doesn’t allow for her to be in the room and sense the emotional rhythms of the participants, which inspired a lot of the monoprinting in her previous work in care homes. For her, the process of print making became an analogy for how memory fades in experiences of dementia:
“The memory that’s really bothering you will be drawn over and over again, and as an artist that’s actually what you spend your life doing. You think you’re doing different things, but you’re usually going over things a lot because something in your creative soul is saying do it this way – you have a thread.”
She spoke about the reciprocal and relational nature of an engaged arts practice where the residents were learning from her, but she also gained new insights and knowledges from them:
“It was a privilege to work with them! We always tend to think of the difficulties of working with people with dementia, not the positives and possibilities, and how they can give back to somebody like me. It was one of the most joyful experiences of my life! I am really looking forward to doing this project – we just don’t know what is going to happen!”
Of importance to her is creating a non-pressurised and inclusive space, respectful of diversity of people with dementia. As part of this, she endeavours not to use the work of the residents but rather to use the way they work to inform her installation – how they make things and how memories (re)surface during the activity. The project in Bury involved a lot of thinking around process and with the different format involved in Fold, Helena is interested to see the differences in process across the two projects.
In her feminist artistic practice, she is keen to be very clear about her method, process, and the assemblage of others involved in the work. As part of this, Helena acknowledges the complicated nature of her work and that sometimes it is hard to translate it into an easily digestible form. Instead, she prefers to acknowledge and sit with the complexity of the art and the diversity of responses from the people with dementia.
Finally, in thinking about the potential installation and output from Fold, she touches on her current interest of collage, both as a method and metaphor for the work. For her, cutting and sticking is putting different elements, ideas, and work into conversation with each other. The richness of Fold through the diversity of memories, experiences, interpretations, impressions, and mediums is an exciting prospect. In staying with the spontaneity of life, and art, Helena is engaging with experiences of dementia in new and exciting ways.
You can see more of Helena’s work here: http://www.helenatomlin.com/project-stories.html