Helena Hunter and the art of falling birds

FALLING BIRDS is the title of a new exhibition at The Horniman Museum in London which displays artworks and images of extinct and endangered species illustrated with poetic text. It is the latest exhibition by Helena Hunter, who works across performance, poetry and the visual arts, and whose art is rooted in the landscape of North Yorkshire.

"I moved from Manchester to Stokesley in 1986 when I was seven," she said. "Moving from inner-city Manchester to the rural landscape of the North York Moors was a complete culture change. I had access to the moors and wildlife.

“But the landscape was also full of contrasts with the industry in nearby Teesside and the dramatic coastline. I was living with two extremes.

“This gave me the groundwork for my interest in environmental issues and the artistic work I would develop later in London.

"Stokesley school gave me the platform to experiment with drama, art, performance and writing," she said. “I was lucky to attend school when the arts were flourishing and the teachers there gave us the space and encouragement to experiment, to succeed and to fail and find our own voice, questioning the world and systems around us."

It was here that Helena developed her interest in the arts which she pursued by studying theatre and performance at Bretton Hall, University of Leeds.

"We had creative freedom to experiment with sound, movement and spoken word against the background of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park," she said.

After travelling round Europe with partner, Mark Peter Wright, they decided to move to London with all its challenges but also its access to different artists and artforms.

They set off in an old van, with no money, no furniture and no jobs lined up, but a contact offered them a room in a shared house for very cheap rent.

"Being in London in 2003 was possibly the most exciting time of my life," said Helena. "People were making art happen everywhere – in abandoned old buildings and factories, galleries and railway arches, encouraging emerging artists like me to make work with performance."

On the hunt for work, Helena walked into the offices of the experimental theatre company, The People Show, and they hired her. She was also creating her own performance art, The Horse Girl, a girl's body with a horse's head. Dressed in a tutu and tap shoes she failed to stand and finish her dance, creating a piece full of pathos, about a creature who was different, facing a world who wouldn't let her in.

The award-winning British live artist Marisa Carnesky saw the show and invited Helena to join her live ghost train creation along with other emerging artists such as Paloma Faith, Tai Shani (winner of the Turner prize 2019), and Paul Kieve (creator of illusions for Harry Potter). It was a magical fairground ride and part of Helena's role was to be suspended by a harness and fly through the air. She was taught by a professional trapeze artist which didn't stop her occasionally getting entangled in the wire while frantically trying to keep the show going.

"There are often hairy moments when you are performing live," she said. "I had to coat the floor with fairy liquid for my performance, the Horse Girl, but once I misjudged the amount and I couldn't stand up. Also, it splattered all up the walls of the Barbican Gallery, which I was scrubbing until the early hours.

“In the summer I toured Europe and the horse mask was stifling. I had to widen the eye holes, too, as I couldn't see where the audience were, so they got a back to front performance."

In 2004 she joined Shunt, a London-based collective, whose performance space was in the vaults of London Bridge. Shunt’s show Tropicana was in collaboration with the National Theatre and was a massive success, featuring often in the Sunday Times as a must-see. It included Helena dancing in high heels on a hearse. She had to run through the maze of vaults between scenes, and was frequently followed by an army of rats.

She was also teaching in universities and touring with her own work, Tracing Shadows, which she performed at the Royal Opera House and reached the final of the Arts Foundation Award.

"I was working 24/7 and knew the pace was unsustainable," she said. "I had to change direction and I was lucky to be accepted at Slade School of Fine Art, studying and experimenting with film, photography and different art forms."

Studying at Slade enabled her to make work in different media, which she wanted to use to highlight urgent issues of environmental change. She formed a collaboration with Mark, who had just completed his PhD and was now a researcher at the University of Arts London, and they created an artistic-research practice called Matterlurgy.

Matterlurgy’s first commission was with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) where Helena and Mark worked with steelworkers, artists, and writers at South Gare, Redcar, looking at how to work with pollution and environmental change, exhibiting collages of materials, text and film.

They have also collaborated with zoologists, historians, climate scientists, astrologists, conservationists, curators, environmentalists, and digital makers in museums, on remote islands, on rivers and in universities internationally. They spent six weeks in a tiny village Norway working with the community on flooding. It resulted in a huge installation in an abandoned hydropower station.

In London, they worked with eminent scientists on air pollution, creating a virtual reality world with headsets.

Helena continued her solo work, exploring museum collections at the Natural History Museum, and she was awarded a three-month residency at the Horniman Museum, in south London, where she worked in the conservation department, creating the untold stories of endangered and extinct birds in a different way, and restructuring the traditional forms of museum displays.

This led to her new exhibition which runs until October 10, 2021 – surely between now and then, we will be freed from the virus to visit the capital, but in the meantime a film about it can be found on YouTube by putting in Helena’s name and the title of the exhibition, Falling Birds.

"Lockdown was initially a worry for artists like myself," she said. "But the art world is always very responsive and attentive to current situations. People are creating online spaces and events for exhibitions. You have to really think creatively about how to make art work online and how to continue to reach audiences with your work."