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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Like the figures found in a spread of Tarot cards, an artist can assume a variety of viewpoints and characters – a soldier or a pilgrim, a journalist or a madman – each position allowing for a new way of looking at the world  Marine Hugonnier trained as an anthropologist, and deploys the vagaries of perspective as the material of her work, in films, photographs, and sculptures that often unravel their process – what happens on set, small failures, and the mechanisms of observing and making She has exhibited widely over the past 15 years, with recent solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Seoul, at the BALTIC Centre, Gateshead, and Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo   At the center of her practice is a set of films which approach the politics of looking: Ariana (2003), set in Afghanistan, concerned with the strategic, military point of view; The Last Tour (2004) with the tourist’s gaze; and Travelling Amazonia (2006) with the colonial map, and the cartographer’s attempts to subjugate space In the collage series, Art for Modern Architecture (2004-0ngoing), for which she is most widely known, Hugonnier performs surgery on the frontpages of newspapers marking the death of Kennedy or the fall of the Berlin Wall, transplanting the original pictures with coloured blocks The obliterated images still loom, as if scored into collective consciousness   When I request an interview, Hugonnier responds to my email almost immediately, and we meet in her modest studio just two days later The small, high-ceilinged room has the aura of a decorous living room A neat archive of her work covers one wall; an elegantly framed collage hangs opposite Aged 46, Hugonnier is lean and beautiful, with a thick ponytail, and dressed in supple leather trousers and black mohair She watches me carefully with ash-green eyes which are attentive, and a little cold   I question Hugonnier, in what never develops into a fluent conversation, but one punctured with pauses that my recorder breathes in Although French is her native language, she is highly eloquent in English, and able to explain her work in both theoretical and magical terms Composed at her desk, Hugonnier opens her catalogue raisonne and awaits my questions,

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Art

June 2012

'The Freedom of Speech Itself', or the betrayal of the voice

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art

June 2012

‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only...

fiction

January 2013

Animalinside

László Krasznahorkai

Max Neumann

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

January 2013

IV     Every space is too tight for me. I move around, I jump, I fling myself and...

poetry

December 2011

Return After Earthquake

Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

although left for months my house is still standing here on terra firma branches broken by snow fallen into...

 

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