I have finally finished my work and have sent it to Elizabeth T who will kindly carry it to Phoenix. I haven’t had too much time in this project to really think and so the work is an amalgamation of ideas in progress. The blue pieces of oak are small gifts from my partner David…he works next to me and is a furniture designer and maker. Almost daily he leaves me small gifts of things/stuff that he makes or finds and these often go on to feature in my work. The blue pieces are the ends/offcuts of long planks of wood that he has been using in various commissions and projects. I have a rather nice collection of blue end-pieces in the shape of the letter H. I also had some work on my wall, some scraps of paper put together, which I had made in response to a visit to Amy Tavern’s studio at Penland a few years ago, where she introduced me to her collection of envelope papers…you can see in the image the same blue shape appearing…I hadn’t realised this until I looked back through my images. It reminded me of this blue wooden house that I have had since I was a child and a memory of these objects that kept flashing through my mind as I made this work. Finally the drawings on the enamel have been made as I walk and then repeated/scratched in the enamel. I guess this work is somehow about being home after travelling a great deal over the last few years…it’s a good feeling.

Helen Carnac

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The work is almost done…I will post more info when complete…

Helen Carnac

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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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