Walking, according to Helen Marten, is nothing short of an erotic experience, “like unfolding a love letter; you’re stepping in and out of intimacies, the secret bits, the dirty parts”.
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.
Since she graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin school of art in 2008, the momentum behind Marten has been remarkable. 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”.
This year has seen Marten rapidly elevated into the uppermost echelons of the art world. 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.
Yet Marten has used the awards podium to express her disdain for the overprivileged, “hermetic bubble” of the industry that has just spent the year embracing her. Accepting the Hepworth prize, she said she felt “frankly a little embarrassed about it all”.
“Everyone in this room is operating in this world that is so fucking privileged,” she told the audience gathered at the Tate for the Turner prize ceremony on Tuesday. “We’re afforded so much optimism and education and time to do these things, and this is not the global consensus.”She has said she will split the £30,000 Hepworth prize and the £25,000 Turner winnings with her fellow nominees.
“There should never be a hierarchy presented in the cultural sector which says ‘I privilege this thing over another’ because that’s not what we’re doing … Without sounding cynical, I really hope it [the Turner prize] won’t change my life and that things will continue as they are.”
Born in Macclesfield in 1985, the smaller of twin sisters, Marten was part of an erudite household filled with conversation and intellectual debate. Her father was a pharmaceuticals industry chemist and her mother was a biologist with a degree in psychology and a PhD in the semiotics of racism. 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.
After completing an art foundation course at Central Saint Martins, Marten was accepted into Oxford’s Ruskin school of art, where her tutor was the influential artist and curator Richard Wentworth – a key champion of her work after she graduated.
Wentworth remembers Marten as being part of an “energy field at Ruskin at that time”.
“I remember her being unbelievably hardworking,” he said. “I might sometimes leave very late and there she would still be, doing something nuts but getting away with it. 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. He added: “It’s very easy to support somebody like that. It’s not to do with working hard, it’s about being driven and resourceful.”
Marten herself acknowledges how deeply entrenched she is in making art. “I care so much that sometimes it’s really crippling,” she said recently.
The photographer Charlie Engman, who was studying at Ruskin alongside Marten, recalls her working so hard during her final show that she was taken to hospital for exhaustion.
“I do remember she would work herself very hard,” said Engman. “She was very driven and always seemed very clear in what she wanted to achieve and how she wanted to achieve it. 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.”
Having returned to Macclesfield to make work in her parents’ garage, Marten had her first solo show just two years after she graduated, when she was invited to exhibit in Naples by a gallerist who had seen her work online. Other international shows followed, from the Kunsthalle in Zurich to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and finally her first exhibition in a UK public gallery in 2012 at the Chisenhale.
It was this show, titled Plank Salad, that caught the attention of the art world.
Polly Staple, the director of the Chisenhale gallery, worked with Marten on the show. She said she had been struck from the off by how ambitious and confident Marten’s work was for such a young artist.
“I remember she came into the gallery, this tiny blond pixie, and even though she was nervous she was so articulate in how she was able to talk about her work. She had this confidence and there was already a deftness in the way she could handle material.”
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. Every object is then handmade – Marten works with ceramicists, metalworkers, carpenters and embroiderers to create the strange components that form her art.
Her starting point, however, is nearly always books – a nod to her first love at school, English literature. Staple recalls Marten’s first studio being divided in two, one half workbenches and machinery and the other a library.
“Helen has a way with colliding images and language in her conversation just as she does in the work,” said Staple. “She has a really good sense of humour and a kind of playfulness and an idea of the absurd. Her very quick intelligence means she’s able to hold in play many different materials, forms and ideas, which is very skilful. 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 thing about Helen is she’s totally committed to the work,” said Staple. “Other artists ask why she’s so successful and it’s because she works really fucking hard. It’s non-stop and it’s not easy. The work doesn’t rest.”
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”.
The poetry of Marten’s work reminded him of Emily Dickinson, he said, adding: “It’s a lot of small, fragmented erotic experiences that are somehow stitched and held together, right on the edge of falling apart – and then it doesn’t.”
The emotionally provocative nature of Marten’s work is needed in art now more than ever, he said.
“Helen’s work is the emotional response to the age we are all living through, full of frustration and anger and disappointment,” he said. “You feel overwhelmed and yet you can be sucked in, seduced and be fascinated by those details – all at the same time.”
Helen Marten’s CV
Born Helen Elizabeth Marten, in 1985 in Macclesfield
Career Graduated from Ruskin school of art in 2008 and had her first solo show at a gallery in Naples in 2010. She exhibited work in Paris, New York and Berlin before her first London show in 2012. 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 She was awarded the inaugural Hepworth prize for sculpture and then the Turner prize within the space of two months, at the age of just 31
Low point Worked so hard at Ruskin during her final degree show that she burned herself out with exhaustion
What she says “I often worry that artists can get into this hilarious kind of masturbatory practice … I mean, how it can be mean-spirited or self-congratulatory if all the hooks, all the one-liners, the loops, are a contented pat on the back: hermetic”
What they say “I hate the idea of artists as rising stars, because they all too often turn into next year’s burnt-out asteroids. But imagine what Marten might do with an asteroid. Rarely have I been so struck” – Adrian Searle
