Alchemy that creates joy from junk
September 2006
Helen Denerley: “I love scrap, the older the better. Each piece brings with it its own story.”
by Bill Cheyne
Walking into Helen Denerley’s studio I find her working on a sculpture for a hospital in Wales. She has three days to finish it and load it up for transporting south… and the hospital has already sent out the invitations to the unveiling!
“It’s the usual rush with that mixture of adrenalin and total focus to the point where normal life ceases to exist. I have come to accept that that is the only way it works for me, but it’s always a gamble and it would take so little for it all to go wrong.”
It is 29 years since she completed her first commission – a play sculpture for Aberdeen District Council – and in that time her work has gone all over the world. From Scotland to Japan her unique talent for creating vibrant animal life from redundant scrap metal has given enormous pleasure to so many people. I am surely certain that she is the only person to have visited South Georgia to build a metal whale.
To quote Helen: “I like to do one piece and know there is only one.”
Helen came to Aberdeen when she was seven. Her father left the Roslin Institute in Midlothian to work at the Rowett Research Institute at Bankhead.
Schooldays were not her happiest days: “It was assumed I would go to university, as art was not as valued a career as it is now. I decided to follow my heart and wanted to be independent at an early age, so I went to Art School at 17.
“I always loved drawing and spent a lot of time on my own as a child wandering around the countryside with an old army bag which held my drawing materials. I don’t think anyone knew where I was half the time, but I was happy to be at one with nature.”
She is not sure why she chose to study sculpture at Gray’s School of Art: “…maybe it was the atmosphere in that department, but I never stopped drawing and even now I sometimes go on painting courses for pleasure.
“I like working in 3d and metal is good because it is constructing rather than carving. It’s adding bits and leaving spaces until it’s just right.”
That is a strong part of her work – spaces.Ask her who influenced her early work and she quotes Calder, Tinguely, Noguchi; but, “The biggest influence on my work and life has been the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown who, before he died, became a friend. The spaces he leaves between words is more important than the words, like Japanese Haiku poetry and this is what I try to do with physical space.”
What about her choice of materials?
“I love scrap, the older the better. Some pieces are sculptures in their own right. I like taking things out of context and seeing them as something else. Using scrap, each piece brings with it its own story.
“How do I start a piece? With research… looking at an animal, or pictures of it, trying to see what makes it unique. For the biggest piece I have done, Dreaming Spires – better known as the giraffes in Edinburgh – I spent two days at Marwell Zoo, drawing, photographing, but most of all observing. It’s that mind-clearing thing; you don’t know how much is going in but then, when you try a bit like the car door for her side you just know its right.
“I spend a lot of time gazing at my scrap pile considering shapes. For a big piece like the giraffes my studio was not big enough, so I found a warehouse in the Highlands, drew them on the wall to scale – 20ft tall – then transferred that on to the floor so that I could play with the bits of metal. I had then to get it standing as soon as possible to start welding.”
It was six months from start to fixing in an Edinburgh street, surrounded by helpers, police, engineer and a coterie of assorted citizens.
“Public sculpture is very important for me. It is an opportunity for all those who can’t have their own sculpture to enjoy that experience. Commissioned work brings its own challenges; for instance, in specifying a theme I might never have thought of. I love the process of setting aside the other parts of life, housework, admin, communication, etcetera, and then filling the mind and the eyes with the research: problem solving with intuition and then getting edgy enough to start. The artistic decisions have been made – now it’s time to just weld.
“I love these times ‘cos I can plan the next bit and lose myself in melting metal.”
Helen loves to work where she lives in Strathdon; she feels a strong affinity with the work of highland artists and is sure that the Strathdon hills have something to do with feeling that connection.
The worksheet for 2007 is already pretty full. Spring sees a one woman exhibition at the prestigious Beaux Arts Gallery in Bath. In summer she contributes to an interesting touring exhibition called Seeing Dragons in the Clouds which will be persuading young people to look at the world differently through workshops held in the various galleries hosting the show. (We will have to travel to Edinburgh to see it.) Then she has an open invitation to go back to add more of her pieces to those they already own in Hokkaido. Her Strathdon garden is not going to get a lot of attention in 2007.
Back to the present and her current sculpture. It is a piece which will sit on the lawn of a Welsh Hospital as a tribute to a diabetes consultant – who, incidentally, was Helen’s cousin.
The commission specified the inclusion of the Diabetic Society’s symbol, a humming bird. Which revelation explained why, when she said that I could come and interview her, she added “…but I may be a bit distracted by humming birds”.
After 35 years of trying to inculcate in the young a critical appreciation of the visual arts, BILL CHEYNE abandoned what was an impossible task and instead, decided to educate himself.
This is an article from the September 2006 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.