Helen Kilby Nelson
My practice has developed from a socially engaged arts background, rooted in working with people, place and systems. Earlier projects explored questions of identity, authority and collective experience, including a two-year community project in Stratford-upon-Avon, work with The Parallel State, and a collaboration with Amelia Hawk alongside participants from the Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre and Warwickshire County Council’s Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme. These experiences established an ongoing interest in how systems shape and define lived experience, and how individuals navigate, resist and respond to them.
Illness led to a period of pause, which in turn prompted a shift in my practice. Through slowing down, reflection and observation, I began to reconnect with making in a more personal and material way. Journaling became a central process, allowing me to process and hold experience over time.
My current work focuses on lived experience within multiple systems—medical, institutional and personal—and the tensions between them. I explore the gap between lived reality and the institutional voice, working with fragments of language and material to disrupt, reframe and reduce systems of authority.
While the scale and form of the work has shifted, the core concerns remain. My practice continues to question systems, challenge structures of power, and seek ways of reclaiming autonomy through making.
Lived Experience
My practice is shaped by lived experience of navigating healthcare and institutional systems over time. As someone who is AuDHD, these experiences have informed both how I move through the world and how I make work.
Coming from a working-class background and entering the arts later in life, I bring a perspective that is attentive to how systems are encountered, understood and negotiated in everyday contexts. Experiences of difference and stigma from an early age have further shaped this awareness, informing an ongoing sensitivity to how individuals are positioned within social and institutional structures.
A period of illness created a pause in my practice, allowing time for reflection and a shift towards more personal, material ways of working.
I tend to approach both life and practice through attention to detail, collecting and holding information in order to understand a wider picture. This way of thinking sits at the core of my work, where fragments are brought together to explore the relationships between lived experience and the structures that attempt to define it.
