Private View: 5 October 6:30 – 8:30PM
Exhibition Run: 6 October – 12 November, 2017

 

Shouting in Whispers is a solo exhibition by Helen Cammock. Based on research, found materials and conversations, Cammock creates intersectional dialogues that look at individual and collective power, questioning the role of the individual, asking us to consider where we sit within the political and social spaces we inhabit: “I have a role in this, as I believe we all do”.

Her practice explores history and storytelling through layered, fragmented narratives using a range of mediums including video, photography, installation, print and performance. She interrogates the ways stories are told, the hierarchy of histories and who is rendered invisible and therefore unacknowledged. With multiple registers of the voice- singing, speaking, reading poetry–as well as multiple voices, Cammock ventriloquises; crossing time and place to create associations between cultural and political moments, questioning and creating new meaning through her utterances, and identifying linkage from past to present.

Each work in the exhibition is connected– some clearly, some less directly, including a film; an installation built around a newly compiled collection of stamps; two series of prints and three performances that will punctuate the exhibition’s beginning, middle and end.

Cammock’s work is prefaced by writing, borrowing the words of others to use alongside her own, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon and Jamaica Kincaid. She re-tells histories that have been silenced, unheard, unrecorded or uncategorised into the whitewashed, generalised and dominant histories we read, teach and tell today.

The artist’s own history and identity also impacts her work. Having worked as a social worker before becoming an artist, she remains attentive to the structural oppression and inequality across communities she saw during this time. Her Jamaican father was much older than her English mother and once lived in a village with a woman who had been born a slave. This touchstone, a close link to what we imagine to be a very different past, was often in her mind as a child.

Helen Cammock (b.1970, England) gained her MA in Photography from the RCA in 2011 and her BA (hons) in Photography from the University of Brighton in 2008. She had an exhibition and commission with Bookworks as part of Hull City of Culture, 2017 and has been included in the Serpentine Cinema series, Tate Artist Moving Image Series and Open Source 2016.

Performances:

Thursday 5 October, 7:30 and 8PM approximately
Thursday 19 October, 7PM
Sunday 12 November, 4.00PM (please note the gallery will be closed until 4PM for rehearsal)

Thanks to:

The Elephant Trust, Lubaina Himid, Magda Stawarska-Beavan, University of Central Lancashire and the Making Histories Visible Project and, of course, Helen Cammock.
        

Graphic Design by Cecilia Serafini

WATCH: HELEN CAMMOCK IN CONVERSATION WITH CURATORIAL FELLOW HELEN NISBET