Helen Acklam
Helen spent her childhood in South Wales and is now based in Bristol.
Her practice is a site-specific exploration of grief, death, shame and place. Through research, documentation and an embodied, multidisciplinary practice, she explores her adolescent experience of stillbirth and her identity today as a mother without children.
Collaborating with materials, collected from a particular site in the Garw Valley, she is drawn to their tactility and smell. Sifting and sorting through them, she finds affinity with their propensity to ooze, break apart, and misbehave. What results are pigments, traces, objects, installations and filmed performances in which elements soak, drip, clod and merge with her body.