Helen Marten Artworks

With fragments that jump from medium to medium, they are poetic, theatrical, visually rich, self-reflexive, convoluted, and maddeningly layered. Seductive but also exasperating is the realisation that you can only scratch the densely overloaded surface. See for instance, Census (2018), The Lemon (2016), and Fixed Sky Situation (2019).

Marten's clusters of beguiling, finely crafted, and carefully juxtaposed obliquely suggestive items—on walls, the floor, or suspended high—are interspersed with tiny texts or quotes rendered in sculpted cursive script that bombard the visitor with potential entries to meaning—conceptual pathways that invariably dissolve. Although digital methods of production, such as three-dimensional printing or 'collage' image collating, are used, they are not the point. She thinks her thinking shows more of an analogue sensibility.

Although the presentation has a lot of the anarchic unpredictability of innovative sculptors like Jessica Stockholder, Isa Genzken, or Rachel Harrison, Marten clearly also loves large paintings, conventional illustration, kids' books, toys, and recontextualised or reassembled language. Though highly eclectic, she seems to fit into an English tradition that includes Lewis Carroll, Laurence Sterne, and R.B. Kitaj—with a keen leaning towards generative text.

Marten's installations may be baffling but they are not confrontational. They have a sweetness that invites the viewer to attempt to decipher, to investigate the different scales, codes, games, and verbal layerings. They are not antagonistic or patrician, but engaging through their open playfulness, seeking to create pleasure by the encouraging the investigation of elements section by section, but avoiding any simple cohesive overview. Examples include 1094 bones (2018), Exfoliating curve lines (total cushioning) (2014), Part offering (hit the mahogany) (2014), and Alive at five (2012).