Artist-led workshop with Helen Cammock

Saturday 16 March 2019, 10am – 4pm

Unit 207
Broad Street Mall
211 Broad Street
Reading RG1 7QH

Reading International wishes to invite the people of Reading to participate in a workshop led by contemporary artist Helen Cammock.

This one-day workshop will invite participants to come along to discuss what community means to them – collectively we will explore our ideas through a variety of approaches including drawing, photography and writing (poetry).

As a group we will decide what we might want to say to the people of Reading – it may be questions/provocations/quotes – that will become the basis of a temporary exhibition in the Sir John Madejski Art Gallery at Reading Museum, and across multiple public spaces across Reading town centre.

Refreshments will be provided for all participants.

Helen Cammock and NOVEL would like to thank Reading International, Elaine Blake and all the staff at Reading Museum, Mary Genis at CultureMix, Jeff Jones and the Barbados and Friends Association of Reading (BAFA).

For further information please contact Steph Mitchell at Reading International:

Email: steph@readinginternational.org

Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8050

Exhibition Information:

Helen Cammock
The Sound of Words
14 March – 19 March 2019
Closing drinks: 5-7pm Tuesday 19 March 2019

Sir John Madejski Art Gallery
Reading Museum,
Blagrave Street,
Reading,
RG1 1QH

Helen Cammock works across moving image, photography, writing, poetry, spoken word, song, performance, printmaking and installation. She is interested in histories, authorship, storytelling and the excavation of lost, unheard and buried voices, often mapping her own writing, literature, poetry, philosophical and other found texts onto social and political situations. Her work has drawn on material from Nina Simone, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, The Housemartins, Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon and others to reveal the way in which we construct our own personal collage of influences and reference points to establish our own sense of self, context and history.

Helen Cammock’s work has recently been screened as part of the Serpentine Cinema Series and Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme. She has exhibited at venues including Cubitt, London; Galerie Futura Alpha Nova, Berlin; The Tetley, Leeds; Open Source Contemporary Arts Festival; Hollybush Gardens, London;  and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London. She has written for Photoworks and Aperture magazine and was shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize in 2015. Her work has been published in The Photographers’ Gallery journal Loose Associations and in an artist book and vinyl 12” Moveable Bridge with Bookworks, London. She has just finished a commission with Void, Londonderry and is currently working on a project with Serpentine Galleries. She is making work for a new commission with Film and Video Umbrella. Helen was awarded the 7th edition of the Max Mara Prize for Women 2018 and will have an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in June this year and Maramotti Collection in Oct.

NOVEL is an itinerant curatorial and publishing platform devised by Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams that draws together artists writing, texts and poetry that oscillate between modes of fiction and criticism. A cacophony of voices, that is the primary condition of writing, seek to break the habitual methods of representation and productions of subjectivity.

A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970

In May 1970 artist Rita Donagh and a group of students occupied a studio at the University of Reading. Staging events, performances and collective actions they wrote and discussed circumstances within and beyond the confines of the university. Didactic conventions and context were replaced in an attempt to diagram a charged collective knowledge. Activated against a backdrop of student protest, in particular the Kent State massacre, the group sounded political images, registered distance and invested in a politics of time, place and bodies. Donagh’s own response, the painting  Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 uses a social-political cartography to plot distinct events, between image and experience.

This historical scenario acts as a catalyst for the year-long publishing and curatorial project. A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970 will present a programme of interdisciplinary projects, commissions and events – with contributions from Patricia L Boyd, Helen Cammock, Renée Green, Studio for Propositional Cinema, and Steven Warwick.