Moveable Bridge

Moveable Bridge, 2017, made on a residency in Hull, draws together Nina Simone, Philip Larkin, Winifred Holtby and the Housemartins. Partly, Cammock reveals the way in which we construct our own personal collage of influences and reference points to establish our own sense of self, context and history. But through this, Cammock insists on a politics of influence: we are only able to be touched by something if we are able to encounter it in the first place. In Hull, for Moveable Bridge Cammock spoke to those who worked in the docks, as well as to refugees who arrived to a city that voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, juxtaposing their stories with that of Pearson Park, a park created for the workers of Zachariah Pearson, a shipowner who in turn made his profits trading with the slave-driven plantations of the Confederate US, detailing a complex back and forth of industry and infrastructural racism that are still being actively played out as current politics make clear. ‘I’m interested,’ Cammock says calmly, ‘in this opening up and closing down, this seeing and unseeing, this hearing and unhearing. Time doesn’t matter.’ Her works create a web of associations between particular voices and the wider frameworks in which they act, always aware of the poetics and physicality of the distances and barriers crossed in order to arrive here. ‘This is what is consistent,’ she asserts, ‘this ebb and flow.’ What becomes apparent through this journey is the fact that this isn’t about correcting history, but about fundamentally altering the way in which history is told, made and received. https://cfitewassilak.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/profile-helen-cammock/