My name is Helen Carnac and I am an artist based in London.

I trained in metal in the late 80’s, early 90’s at a University in London and have lived and worked in London since. I started enamelling then and have continued ever since, but really felt that I had found the right material when I met Elizabeth (Turrell), she was running a masterclass at a University that I worked at and I was lucky enough to join in. I have always loved drawing and scratching on metal and so liquid process enamel was a great material to combine these things.

Over the past year I have worked in Berlin for 4 months as a Professor and ran a project about long design thinking processes. It revolved around walking, talking, looking and making. We are making a book about it at the moment and so if it is published soon I will tell you more about it here.

This is where I began a body of work for an exhibition that Elizabeth and Beate curated called Drawing, Permanence and Place. I am really fascinated in how walking is so akin to making for me and so I wanted to include sketches and marks made while exploring, and words and thoughts and found objects that I found along the way.

These are some words from my essay for the catalogue..

‘My work considers and is consumed by paths, lines, marks and time…in no particular order they run alongside and across each other. My practice is grounded in the environment and I develop projects using design methodologies that are rooted in an acute awareness of physical location, place and working practices…

I am concerned with relationships between humans and nature through observing short-term day-to-day impacts and longer term temporally evolved traces of co-existence. In practice this may involve watching for and identifying small change. I make observations through walking known routes over and over again, by understanding unknown place through journeying and collecting or by observing material change through using empirical and experimental methodologies in developing my work. I seek to track traces and patterns and to develop more metaphorical understandings’

Helen Carnac

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