Artist Helen Cammock Didn’t Even Have a Gallery When She Won a Turner Prize Nomination. Now, She Just Got Her First Dealer

London dealer Kate MacGarry has now become the artist's first commercial gallery.

Helen Cammock. Photograph by Sebastiano Luciano. Courtesy Kate MacGarry Gallery.

The Turner Prize-nominated artist Helen Cammock has joined the stable of the Kate MacGarry gallery in London.

Cammock’s work, which includes performance, video, photography, and music, is rooted in an intensive research process that explores personal and social histories. She is noted for her ability to address highly sensitive subject matter, including race relations and violence against women, in a poetic and nuanced way. 

The artist credits her background in social work with providing her with the tools she needs to approach these issues with particular care. In a conversation with Artnet News earlier this year, she emphasized the importance of patience in her research and interviews. “I don’t feel so weighed down by people’s experiences now, and I think it’s because I can actually do something with it,” she said of working with her collaborators and subjects.

Before her Turner Prize nomination, Cammock was the subject of a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The exhibition, titled, in Italian, “che si può fare?” (what can be done?), was staged as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, which Cammock won in 2018. The works on view highlighted the experiences of women in Italy throughout history to focus on women’s resilience and survival.

“We’re thrilled to start working with Helen, and really happy to have her singular and unique voice in the gallery program,” Kate MacGarry tells Artnet News. “I’ve been following Helen’s work closely since her show at Cubitt [in London], and she has been very visible since then. Helen is my age—almost my exact generation—and I feel an affinity with her work and her subjects.”

MacGarry will present a show of Cammock’s work in 2021, in addition to a performance at the gallery in July 2020, organized through curator Rose Lejeune’s new Performance Exchange initiative.


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