I am a member of the Desperate Artwives an arts collective set up by Amy Dignam. In 2019 I was invited to record a podcast for Women Up! and was interviewed by Susan Merrick.
Maternal Art Magazine – MAM is a new art magazine focusing on artists from around the world producing work about the maternal. The first issue, Stay At Home due out in June 2020 is a response by 24 artists to their experiences of working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The magazine aims...
Mother/Daughter is a book that has been created through mobile phone text conversations with Helen’s mother. Helen wanted to create a book that documented and recorded her mothers prenatal and birth experiences.
Thinking of my pre-menopausal body and how this has had an affect on my emotions. A sense of loss, sadness, change, fear of the future and how to fill my time as the children grow more independent.
Maternal Journal involves a series of creative workshops that explore the history and practice of journaling and the potential to promote positive mental health and wellbeing.
I have created a free downloadable journaling template - "Mark making to capture connection between mother and baby" for the award winning Maternal Journal project produced by artist and midwife Laura Godfrey Isaacs.
In the autumn term of 2018 I worked at Hoot in huddersfield facilitating a series of workshops about self portraiture fusing drawing and mixed media to help promote mental health and wellbeing. This interview was published via the Hoot blog as part of Mental Health Awareness Week. Body Image &...
‘The M word’ exhibition curated by Amy Dignam of Desperate Art Wives. A group exhibition of visual and material representation of concepts that revolve around the maternal experience, motherhood and maternal mental health.
A series of drawings made using my my mobile phone. Playing with ideas and concepts to express a range of feelings in relation to the state of being pregnant.
I was invited to deliver a drawing workshop for pregnant women about the visualisation of the pregnant body as part of the Creative Birth Programme. The workshop involved exploring the pregnant body through dance, yoga and drawing. I worked in collaboration with midwife, artist, activist Laura Godfrey Isaac; and yoga teacher...
Ten Days at The Mothership, a collaborative arts residency by Helen Sargeant & Naoise Sargeant July 27th- 5th August 2017, Dorset, UK In the summer me and my youngest son Naoise (aged 8) spent 10 days at The Mothership, a beautiful straw bale live/work studio deep in the Dorset countryside....
In September 2016 me and my son spent 14 days as artists in residence at Takahuhti Artcenter, Tampere, Finland, supported by Nicola Smith’s We Are Resident project and funded by the Arts Council. I posted writing and images each day throughout the duration of our residency on the M(other) & Son blog.
A two week collaborative research residency between Helen Sargeant and her son Naoise Sargeant at Takahuhti Artcenter, Tampere, Finland, supported by Nicola Smith’s We Are Resident project and funded by the Arts Council. In September 2016 I spent two weeks with my youngest son Naoise (age 7) taking part in a collaborative arts residency to...
Me and my youngest son Naoise (aged six) played a drawing game in a book. He drew babies in the tummy’s of my mummy’s and I drew babies in the tummy’s of his mummy’s.
A participatory arts project delivered on behalf of Artist As Mother As Artist, an Arts Council funded exhibition curated by Tracey Kershaw and Sam Rose. I worked together with the curators and two groups of parents, their children and a group of women to bake bread from the dust in...
A series that plays with making collaborative composite drawings by me and my two sons. I bring together opposing elements, marks, motifs and characters from each of our drawing practices to explore my own maternal identity and the relationship my children hold with me.
The line that begins a journey, a game, play. You encourage me to follow and trace the lines that you have made. I twist and turn on your line. We laugh together. The line that connects me to you. An umbilical line.
A series of drawings about the female body produced throughout the autumn of 2015. Thinking about the body as container, lactation, sexuality, fertility. Abundant milk and being drained of milk. The cervix opening and closing. Connectivity.
The film utilises 215 intimate family photographs and home video footage taken by the artist, together with autobiographical prose that weaves a journey through Helen's thoughts, feelings and experiences of breastfeeding.
"Autobiographical writing is juxtaposed with photographs taken at home and during the school run using my smart phone camera. Photographs record the ever shifting, transitory time I share with my family. There are shadow portraits of me and my son playing, of my son sleeping, intimate observations of his body...
Playing with embedding my children's drawings into my own, thinking about the body of the mother and the child, gender, sexuality, nurture and protection.
“The egg, the womb, the head and the moon” www.eggwombheadmoon.com, has been created to show existing work and research-driven practice about the maternal by the Mewe arts collective in response to the title. The site includes documentation of visual art work, video, sound, performance and texts by members of Mewe, including contextual dialogue...
"Between 1995 and 1997, I lived and worked from a studio in the old nurses building at Brockhall Village on the site of a derelict Victorian Asylum together with 30 other artist, including the performance artist Michael Mayhew, who I collaborated with on a number of projects including Scenes from The Asylum Wall."...
A small observational painting depicting a headless doll found at Brockhall Village. The doll has the number “239” written on its chest in biro, badly stained, and crudely made out of canvas. It was found in between a broken floorboard space of the derelict hospital together with plastic beads, combs and other small christmas cracker...
Patient was made during an artists residency between 1995 and 1997 at Brockhall Village, Lancashire. Brockhall Village was being developed from a derelict mental asylum into a luxury secure housing estate by the property tycoon Gerald Hitman. Brockhall Village was built in 1904 as an Inebriate Women’s Reforatory, and closed down in 1992 as part...
This painting represents a heavily pregnant woman, a handle that also looks like a transparent tube is attached to her belly. A fine painted line of clotted blood joins flesh and tube. The woman's torso has become amalgamated with a hand held kitchen meat mincing machine.
"No one seems to care about ghosts anymore, they are nonsense, relegated to dubious folklore and kiddies books. Problem is that spooks, spectres, phantoms and phantasms not only exist but haunt in scary abundance a disused Victorian mental asylum in Brockhall Village, where a cabal of artists are summoning the sprites and living amongst them."...
"Its a chicken and egg situation"says Michael Mayhew of Furnace Performance Art Company. "Which comes first? The gallery where art is displayed or the space in which the art is made in the first place?"