Almost a decade after becoming the Turner Prize’s second youngest winner, artist Helen Marten has spoken about the downside of the award and her latest epic work. Marten, now 39, won the prize in 2016 at age 31, sharing her £25,000 winnings with fellow nominees.
Marten described the period after winning as 'a really manic year' that left her feeling 'fragmented' and 'so tired and sad from pushing work off into the world, allowing it to go and stand up on its own – and then be completely misinterpreted'. She said her sculptures were often wrongly described as 'an assemblage of found objects', despite her labouring 'fiercely' over every detail.
Despite the challenges, Marten said the experience made her 'more ferocious'. She is now preparing 30 Blizzards., a two-hour opera for which she wrote the libretto and designed the staging, commissioned by Art Basel Paris and Miu Miu. The piece features 30 main characters and a chorus called Dust, moving from 'deepest night through all of these iterations of the day'.
Marten is also preparing a solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ titled Treatise of a Coat, her first large body of wall-based works. These include coloured-pencil drawings of 'moist things' – people eating snails, animals licking cakes, lots of mouths – mounted inside sculptural frames.
In 2019, Marten wrote a novel, The Boiled in Between, published during lockdown. She described the freedom from 'gravity, production, shipping, physical making' as 'just so much fun'. The book received praise from Nobel prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek and American writer Helen DeWitt.
