Helen Hamilton

Helen Hamilton grew up with a car mechanic for a father and a sewing machinist for a mother, which is probably where all this began. 

Combining irreverent humour with a deep interest in the physical and associative properties of materials, Hamilton’s work creates a cast of characters that situate the art object as a place of porosity and slippage between the positions of ‘subject’ and ‘object’; questioning what can exist in the space between these dualities. Using materials and forms which reference the human/animal the work seeks to investigate whether these elements have an effect on its perceived potential for animacy, and what feelings of kinship and revulsion are evoked when we recognise facets of our own physicality removed from their familiar arrangement and rendered unfamiliar or uncanny. 

Hamilton’s practice originates from thinking around encounters with ‘non-human actors’ and the act of living alongside these other bodies, with her research based in material culture studies, social history, and object-oriented ontology. Underpinning this is her own experience as a working-class artist and the effects of this on her beliefs in the value of labour and craft, and its embodiment in an object through making and social placement. 

She is interested in sentimentality, homemade children’s fancy dress costumes, post-industrial UK towns, magic(k)al thinking, body horror, and that feeling you get when you lock eyes with a stuffed animal.