Helen Cammock’s filmmaking is characterised by deceleration and tranquil shots, to which she brings added emphasis through her own voice. The artist was born in 1970 in Staffordshire, UK, and now lives in London. Before she fully embarked on an art career, she also worked as a singer and in social services. In 2019, Helen Cammock was awarded both the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and the Turner Prize.

For the 2021 evn collection calendar, the artist compiled stills from several of her films. They unfold into a sequence of impressions that is reminiscent of a personal travel diary while leaving free room for thought. Helen Cammock describes her approach as follows:

The calendar is based on a traditional calendar, much like those my grandparents had – they would show landscapes and details (internal and external representations) of places untravelled or places probably experienced only fleetingly. So I wanted to play with this idea of the traditional calendar – using my films as a visual portal, untravelled probably by most who will have this on their wall.

The selected film stills take you through a lyrical kaleidoscope, a temporal rhythm pointing to my image making that locates you within the psychogeographies of my work.

Throughout my filmmaking I often move between the detail of external and internal aspects of public space, and the transition across the two is what a calendar does: calendars are a way to manage the external world – they are about structuring and managing the what and where, and also the how, in its most practical sense. By entering something into a calendar we transition to a management system of the external, and the colour matte – where the monthly calendar table sits – is the site of activation and outward-facing action: planning, strategy, organisation. The images are the world I’m sharing with the viewer – a window experienced in the viewer’s internal space. This is also fundamental to the intent behind my film work – sharing what I see and intersecting it with what I want to say or listen to.

The idea of the colour matte started with my film Moveable Bridge, 2017. It was a way in this film to think about how to create episodic moments, pauses, and transitions. It was also the moment when I incorporated text onto these colour expanses. It provided the foregrounding for analogue screen-prints and developed into recognisable strategy in my print making. I was able to see how the colour matte activated the text – and how with the colour matte as canvas the text also became image. The text comes first and then the colour – and in the calendar the image was selected first and then the colour matte.

evn sammlung, 2021 (translation: Michael Strand)