Helen Barff
Born: Birmingham, England
Lives: London, England
Stack, 2018
Jesmonite
53cm x 38cm x 28cm
Bust, 2015
Concrete and rope
149cm x 19cm x 10cm
Helen Barff is a sculptor and drawer whose work intertwines history, science and storytelling. Braff’s practice evokes animal, human, and hybrid forms—exploring mythologies and the ‘other’ within us. She is interested in how materials are shaped by temporality, or how memory becomes embedded in matter. Barff’s work is often inspired by interviews recalling personal memories.
The work Stack responds to relentless, mundane tasks that come with motherhood. She cast the inside of folded washing, then removed the clothing – leaving a pile of solid forms, an immovable heavy burden, a monument to labour. The retained texture and colour hold an intimacy in its surface of the clothing and family.
Bust is a work made after the artist stopped breastfeeding. It was an instinctive action to fill her maternity bras with concrete– celebratory and grieving. “Bust is a visceral, bodily word as well as strong and feisty. It can refer to sculptural portrait and means broken, at the bottom of one’s reserves,” says Barff. The work is made to hang like a weighty pair of boxing-gloves.