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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...

For some years now, Oscar Murillo has been making work in aeroplanes Out of necessity as much as desire, the Colombia-born artist now calls many places home He has recently shown in New York, Shanghai, Cambridge, Baku, Venice, Ramallah, Gwangju, and Sydney – a non-exhaustive list The critic Viktor Wang has dubbed Murillo’s ‘expanded practice’, which utilises these ad-hoc studio spaces, ‘flight mode’   How to describe Murillo’s work in 2020? He is so prolific that I saw three discrete, overlapping shows of his works within a single summer The artist, who exploded into the art world in 2013, is in a fecund phase Though Murillo was initially synonymous with loud and expressionistic oil pantings, his work today spans mediums — video, drawing, installation, sculpture — and is united more by its themes than by any unified aesthetic   I first met Murillo at the top of David Zwirner gallery in London on a Monday morning in June 2019 He had just started installing his show, Manifestation (2019), that would open that Friday evening He refused coffee, professing that he was pumped on the adrenaline We sat on couches in front of a Luc Tuymans painting – Three Percent (2017), a ghostly bluish close-up of a face in profile – that he would reference several times Later, as we walked out, he gave brisk instructions to the crew who were installing his paintings and constructing a pavilion for an opening night performance In the fall, we spoke again — I in New York, he in Colorado — a week before he became one of the joint winners of the 2019 Turner Prize We spoke one last time in April during the COVID-19 pandemic, while we were both hunkered down for the foreseeable future in New York and Colombia, and revisited some of the newly unstable assumptions of our previous interviews and of the art world at large   Murillo is thirty-four, still young for practically a household name He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in

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

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

fiction

June 2012

Spinning Days of Night

Susana Medina

fiction

June 2012

Day 1 in the Season before Chaos   These were the days before the glitch. The weather was acutely...

Interview

January 2017

Interview with David Thomson

Leo Robson

Interview

January 2017

David Thomson — the author of dozens of books, including an account of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic and...

 

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