Helen Cammock

On WindTides, 2024

Bridge: stencil cut powder-coated steel letters. Display cabinet: powder-coated steel and concrete ballast Bridge: 60m x 1.75m; cabinet: 1.2 x 1.94m

Spanning the River Lea, On WindTides is a large-scale text installation by Helen Cammock that explores movement, migration and change. It consists of a short prose, on either side of a 60-metre cable bridge just north of Cody Dock. One side of the bridge reads ‘we fold ourselves across the tides,’ whilst the other side reads ‘from silt to land sometimes we live as wind blown sand’. The letters sit proud of the bridge, creating shadows with the movement of the sun.

The work was developed in relation to the local area, its heritage and its diverse communities. Once heavily industrial, the landscape and local ecology of the surrounding area is changing. The mint green of ‘we fold ourselves across the tides’ nods to the diverse array of plant and wildlife around the warehouses and canals. The text itself embraces the idea of waterways as connectors, using tides as a metaphor for the ways individuals, communities, neighbourhoods and landscapes change over time.

‘from silt to land sometimes we live as wind blown sand’ prompts us to reflect on how and why people move from one place to another. Like sand, which can settle in a landscape or can be blown elsewhere, we might land somewhere unexpectedly or through intent. This text references movement as a fundamental part of human existence and, with its ochre colouring, represents the shifting mixture of silt, sand and mud of the riverbed.

Nearby, a display cabinet features a changing display of text-based works on paper made by local community groups through workshopped conversations with the artist where participants experimented with text and collage. Using the language, signs and symbols of everyday life, their works respond to the bridge installation and its themes, referencing local history, culture, ecology, and the idea and importance of home. This display changes on a monthly basis, creating a dialogue with the words on the bridge whilst allowing new meanings and interpretations to emerge.

On WindTides is one of three co-commissions developed by The Line in collaboration with local residents. Supported by Newham Council and Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust.

To coincide with the launch of On WindTides, The Line presented Cammock’s film work, The Lay Shaft Drive is Down, alongside Swirling Eddies, Tender Breeze, a series of reproductions of the works on paper created by the local community. The exhibition showed at The House Mill (a 15-minute walk along The Line north of On WindTides) until 30 June 2024. For more information, click on the tab below.

Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.

Supported by

Exhibition: Swirling Eddies, Tender Breeze Exhibition: Tributaries

Biography

Helen Cammock (b.1970) studied at the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art, London, and currently lives between London and Wales. She works across film, photography, print, text, and performance and produces works stemming from a deeply involved research process that explore the complexities of social histories. Central to her practice is the voice: the uncovering of marginalised voices within history, the question of who speaks on behalf of whom and on what terms, as well as how her own voice reflects in different ways on the stories explored in her work.

Cammock was a joint winner of the Turner Prize in 2019. She was nominated for her solo exhibition, The Long Note, which was commissioned by, and exhibited at, Void Gallery, Derry (2018), and then subsequently at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019). The Long Note is a film which explores the history and role of women in the civil rights movement in in 1968, a period generally acknowledged to be the starting point of the Troubles, the Northern Ireland conflict that spanned the 1960s through to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

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