Marten’s work was then included in both the 2013 and 2015 Venice Biennales and she had a solo show at the Serpentine Sackler in 2016 High point … Her very quick intelligence means she’s able to hold in play many different materials, forms and ideas, which is very skilful.
Helen Marten has won the Turner Prize, and has said she intends to share the £25,000 award with her fellow nominees.
Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America/Getty Images. Marten clearly resents the crude suggestion that she's just a collector of bric-a-brac.
Helen Marten is best known for her sculptures, for which she received the Turner Prize and the Hepworth Prize for Contemporary Sculpture, both in 2016… In the last few weeks, it began to seem somehow inevitable, as predictable as Damien Hirst winning in 1995 or Mark Wallinger in 2007. Following a solo show at London’s Serpentine gallery, she proceeded to win the inaugural Hepworth prize for sculpture in November, topping it all off with the Turner prize. Since she graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin school of art in 2008, the momentum behind Marten has been remarkable. For the sculptor, who this week won the highest accolade in contemporary art – the Turner prize – at the age of just 31, even the wares of a plumbing shop verge on the ecclesiastical.
Simon Wallis, the director of the Hepworth Wakefield, who judged both the Hepworth and Turner prizes, said the panels on both had been struck by “the amount of control that she is able to bring to bear on a vast array of material”.
“She was very driven and always seemed very clear in what she wanted to achieve and how she wanted to achieve it. ", The biographical essay in the Tate booklet, accompanying the. But imagine what Marten might do with an asteroid.
“I remember her being unbelievably hardworking,” he said. "Here's to a furthering of communality and a platform for everyone.".
While her work may have the initial appearance of being a hyperactive collection of objects and forms, coming together in a cascade of chaos, everything is in fact precisely made and mapped out, sometimes three or four months in advance. "We are," she says, "archaeologists of our own time."
Making a mould where I would go: ‘You’ll never get that off.’ And then I’d be on the motorway and get a text from her saying: ‘It’s out!’”, Wentworth included Marten in a group show at the Lisson Gallery in 2009 and wrote a piece for the Observer in 2010 touting her as an artist to watch. “Other artists ask why she’s so successful and it’s because she works really fucking hard. Helen Marten presents a series of works from nominated projects Lunar Nibs at the 56th Venice Biennale and Eucalyptus Let Us In at Greene Naftali, New York.Using sculpture, screen printing and writing Marten produces works that are full of models and motifs taken from contemporary visual culture. She had this confidence and there was already a deftness in the way she could handle material.”. The emotionally provocative nature of Marten’s work is needed in art now more than ever, he said. We are meant to be intrigued and a little (if not greatly) puzzled. And yet, it clearly isn't. "A lot of people look at my work and think it's an amalgam of junk, like a granny's attic," she has said. Everything, as she puts it, "is murderously plotted."
"She has the mathematical brain. In retrospect, the signs were all there. ", Growing up in Macclesfield, she felt that becoming an artist never really seemed like a viable option but that's what's she become.
In 2016 she was awarded the Tate Turner Prize. Marten works in a 'rather chaotic studio' by the canal in the East End of London. And it’s impressive, there is a very clear through line between what she was making as a student and what I know of her work now.”. Every object is then handmade – Marten works with ceramicists, metalworkers, carpenters and embroiderers to create the strange components that form her art. Ask Helen Marten what she does and she'll respond with a wry laugh and a question -- "What don't I do? Her labyrinthine works, connecting odd objects in single sculptures, reveal the reverence she has for the material world, and show that – in the words of the Guardian art critic Adrian Searle – she “thinks differently from the rest of us”. “Helen has a way with colliding images and language in her conversation just as she does in the work,” said Staple. ", The work is full of visual riddles. “She has a really good sense of humour and a kind of playfulness and an idea of the absurd.
Long before she's made any work of art, she reads and reads and fills notebook after notebook (she has hundreds of them). It just draws you into these rabbit holes of detail.”, Staple said she had spoken to Marten since she had won the Turner prize but the pair had hardly discussed it. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it. A collector told me over dinner in October that he'd bought a Marten installation for £19,600 ($25,000) two years ago. Three years of her childhood were spent living in Pennsylvania before she came back to the UK and attended the independent King’s school in Macclesfield.
Born in Macclesfield in 1985, the smaller of twin sisters, Marten was part of an erudite household filled with conversation and intellectual debate. Marten works with a team of metalworkers, fabricators, carpenters, ceramicists and seamstresses.