HH TE Love Poem for CF

26 February 2010

Helen –

Since you asked me to write something about your work at Meantime I’ve been trying to think back specifically to the conversation we had about ‘HH TE…’, but it’s increasingly hard to recall. And I (mis)remember subsequent conversations, and previous ones, words get dropped and never found again. Anyhow, here’s my attempt at recovering them... It’s great you realised this work at Meantime; the space exists to create that work.

Sarahb x

As she did last summer, Helen has chosen to occupy the small, dark downstairs space at Meantime over the lighter, more expansive workshop upstairs. And tonight the coach doors are open wide to the back-street, as they have been throughout her stay, for the company of gulls, and cars, and people, and dogs. At certain times the chorus is arresting. In its entirety, this work is an auditory arrangement of comparable density. Helen’s scattered line drawings – seagulls and other solitary figures in flight – hold their positions, and their silence, mid-squalk. Words painted on card and pinned to a rail would seem to offer muted clues to a greater narrative, if they weren’t already obliterated. Open on the back wall is an outsized old notebook, its pages turned to a poem pencilled on top of an outlined face, who’s head is obscured by a black cloud. Next to it a smaller notebook is extended at a transcription of another poem, similar to the first, with a stuffed envelope gaffered below as if to underscore it. On the third wall, at a tangent to the other two, is a large, vociferous canvas. Hesitating before entering this work, the notebooks offer a temporary refuge ahead of an anticipated psychic phenomenon.

This work, HH TE Love Poem for CF is a raw canvas struck with raw paint reciting two poems, those already presented in the notebooks, one on top of the other. In its directness the piece is a complete disruption of internalised expectations of Helen’s work, devoid of the measured restraint and familiar ciphers known to populate it. The poems, it transpires, were written for the same person.  This is known because one of the poems became Tracey Emin’s 2007 neon work Love Poem for CF; the other, written in the notebook on top of the sketched face a few decades earlier, is Helen’s. (The discovery was made when Tracey chose, in the title of the neon, to name ‘CF’; the poem had previously appeared in 1996 as a textile work entitled only Love Poem.)

The strange co-existence of these two poems is compounded by remarkable similarities in form (each is nine lines) and tone, and although they are written at different places in time, from the front and back ends of a love affair, a few years apart, their placement on the canvas enable the words and their meaning to become contiguous, bound together to form an unbroken line. The workings of coincidence conflate the two texts, lines or words begin jumping across the margins resulting in expressions of both timorous pathos and hysterical violence. But beneath the noisy surface, the untreated canvas quietly acknowledges an ordinary shared experience. Even as both women talk directly to CF, and while they talk to us about us and about themselves, they talk to each other. This is a work of solidarity – HH Love poem for TE.

2008-2010