Informed by a research-driven approach to making art, Helen Cammock’s work reflects her English/Jamaican background and her experience of inequality and underrepresentation among the people she met as a social worker before becoming an artist. She collages material from found sources into beautiful works, which gently question the hierarchical nature of the histories that we are told and champion histories that usually remain untold.
Shouting in Whispers (2017) is a group of five large screenprints. Intense colours, hand-mixed by the artist, create rich surfaces that are broken by the interjection of simple texts – questions and statements quoted from philosophers and activists, historic and contemporary, as well as friends of the artist. Slide Re-enactment is a set of three pale screen prints that quietly deliver a punch. Each print is a collage of found images. One of Barak Obama sits beside another of Theresa May. The third is of Shirley Chisholm, the extraordinary activist who was both the first Black American and the first woman to run for a major party presidential nomination in the US in 1972. The addition of enigmatic dictionary definitions turns these apparently political posters into poetry.
Reading Museum has re-joined the Contemporary Art Society as a Museum Member with the support of Reading Foundation for Art. This is at a time when the town is changing rapidly and the museum is actively collecting art that reflects the concerns and interests of its increasingly diverse population.
