The Turner Prize–winning artist Helen Cammock returns to Kate MacGarry with a body of work weaving personal history, industrial legacies and the resonances of protest into sculpture, film, print and song
Helen Cammock: Pelicans Dive At Half Light
12th September, 2025 – 25th October, 2025
Kate MacGarry
27 Old Nichol Street
London E2 7HR
Kate MacGarry will open Helen Cammock’s second solo exhibition this autumn, bringing together new works that reflect on diasporic identity, song, memory and the politics of voice.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a recent series of relief prints made during a visit to Jamaica, where Cammock’s father was raised. Responding to what she calls “the liminal suspension” of her diasporic identity, Cammock maps the sonic and haptic geographies of place—wind, sea and sound—into a meditation on displacement and reckoning.
Her work considers how the body, as a kind of lens, replicates and reactivates histories, “ventriloquising whispers” across archives, stories, dialogue and imagination. From this emerges a Black feminist, intersectional epistemology. Cammock’s starting point is often voice and writing, what she has described as her “audible fingerprint.” From here, she develops moving image, performance, sculpture and crafted objects that hold both personal and structural narrative.
Courtesy of Kate MacGarry © Helen Cammock
A central group of ceramics stems from plaster moulds made by George Cammock, the artist’s father, in the 1960s. Discovered after his death, the cast animals probe themes of inheritance, vulnerability, violence and protection. Elsewhere, a new wall-based work, Buckets of Lead (2025), spells out stainless-steel letters that confront the mythmaking and ideological veneers sustaining violence.
During a residency at Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio, Cammock encountered the work of Mary Brooksbank, a Scottish jute mill worker, activist and songwriter. Brooksbank’s poem Courage, found in the University of Dundee archives, inspired a meditation on working-class women’s voices and the intertwining of poetry and protest. Cammock has engraved the text on a large plywood panel, placing it in dialogue with If I Run My Palm Along the Twine (2024), a screen-print on jute. The choice of material, long tied to British mills and the clothing of enslaved people, brings labour, endurance and historical violence into sharp relief.
In Coalescence (2025), a newly engraved text written as a call-and-response to Brooksbank’s Courage, Cammock spans nearly a century of violence, rhyme and resistance.
Film also plays a central role. The Lay Shaft Drive Is Down (2023), originally commissioned by The Line, London, unfolds inside The House Mill, an 18th-century gin distillery on the River Lea. Drawing on the site’s industrial and colonial history, the work interrogates child labour, mechanisation and the emotional toll of productivity.
Courtesy of Kate MacGarry © Helen Cammock
The film is anchored by a “work song” written and performed by Cammock, repeating as a motif alongside a script informed by research into industrialisation, colonial trade and the writings of Adam Smith, George Eliot and William Hogarth. Moving through the mill’s cavernous interiors, the piece shifts between Cammock’s song, traditional mill ballads such as Hard Times in the Mill, and the African American spiritual Wade in the Water—a layering of voices, soundscapes and historical echoes.
Born in Staffordshire in 1970, Cammock lives and works between North Wales and London. She was joint recipient of the Turner Prize in 2019 and winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017. Her recent solo exhibitions include I Will Keep My Soul at Art + Practice, Los Angeles and UNO Gallery, New Orleans (2023); Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn (2023); and Behind the Eye is the Promise of Rain, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2022).
This September, she will premiere a new film, Persistence (2025), at the National Portrait Gallery as part of Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture.
Helen Cammock: Pelicans Dive At Half Light opens on the 12th of September, 2025 until the 25th of October, 2025 at Kate MacGarry
©2025 Helen Cammock
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