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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...

At the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, radiant geodes have been placed in the corners for the safeguarding of Deana Lawson’s exhibition PLANES In this city, the protective quality of crystals is accepted in the same way that lightbulbs are agreed to be sources of light In certain corners, Lawson tacked up numerous 4 x 6 inch glossy prints: snapshots of her own younger self alongside scenes of atrocity, ritual, expedition and celebrity Many of the images were scanned during her expansive research into black visual culture at American libraries The assembled histories could be read as reports from a diasporic cosmology   The collages also serve as the mood boards for Lawson’s own photographs, presented here as framed inkjet prints, each around four feet tall They depict black people of various ages in staged domestic scenes The models are often strangers to the artist and each other; the entwined man and woman in SEAGULLS IN KITCHEN (2017), for example, weren’t previously acquainted, and the brass birds that shadow them on the cinder block wall migrated there for the shoot For WOMAN WITH CHILD (2017), the artist placed her own son alongside another woman as if he were a momentary changeling At first, the images register as intimate family portraits, a testament to Lawson’s ability to disarm her subjects Even the man holding a shotgun defensively in UNCLE MACK (2017) has a softness about his wizened face   In these images, identity is both inscribed on bodies and articulated through their surroundings The interiors, shot in New York, South Africa and LA, appear underprivileged yet regal Motifs recur: parquet flooring, bath towels on sofas, elephant statuettes, grandma curtains (Zadie Smith has averred that ‘paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone’) Certain objects give the impression that other characters have vanished, or perhaps just wait in the wings: matriarchs out shopping, children put to sleep In SOWETO QUEEN (2017), a nude woman crouches on a towel alongside remote controls,

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

feature

December 2011

Egyptian Revolution: Bloody Wednesday (2 February 2011)

Omar Robert Hamilton

feature

December 2011

Almost one year on from the first battles in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s future remains uncertain. Many Egyptians believe that,...

Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

Art

March 2013

Strangely Ordinary: Ron Mueck's art of the uncanny

Anouchka Grose

Art

March 2013

Since the Stone Age, people have been concerned with the problem of how to represent life.   Cave paintings...

 

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