Helen Marten

Helen Marten’s installations may sit within the physical world, but they operate with an awareness of the infinite connotations of the virtual. Crafted from wood, steel and clay, or domestic items, Marten’s output includes sculpture, videos, text, and screen-printed paintings. Marten presents entwined networks of words, images, and things in absurd reflections of the everyday. Her subjects flirt with snags and boundaries, errors and perversion. “Giving something a title is almost like giving it a punch line,” Marten once commented, a sentiment that reflects both the artist’s comic lens and her understanding of the relationship between the material world and language. Her work has been compared with historical assemblage sculpture and discussed within the context of Mark Leckey’s contemporary theories of object systems.